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Tête-à-Tête, Bavaria, 2015. One of the images from Ellen von Unwerth’s “Heimat”. Photograph: Ellen von Unwerth can’t stop laughing. The German photographer, 63, is bouncing around the Taschen gallery in West Hollywood in her sneakers, attempting to talk through the images from her latest exhibition and art book, “Heimat”. “So heimat means Fatherland or Motherland or where you were born and where your roots are”, she tells me. “Bavaria is not my heimat, but we wanted to make a parody of the whole Bavarian thing”. The whole Bavarian thing, apparently, involves supermodels frolicking nude in Alpine meadows, performing suggestive acts with sausages, udders and holy virgins, sledging topless, spanking one another in dirndls and generally enjoying the fecundity and vigour for which the southern German slopes are celebrated. “Oh, ja, it’s very sexual there, even the clothes they push up the bosoms and there are lots and lots of sausages, ha ha ha”, she explains. “But you see so many images that are dark and depressing at the moment. All these sad women being sad! So I figured, let’s show girls having fun and enjoying life”. (Photo by Ellen von Unwerth)
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