Mysterious, dark, and devoid of any solid emotion are the human models in the portfolio of William Ropp. In Ropp's world, his models appear to be isolated from the world in an often eerie and peculiar atmosphere. Small slivers of light fall upon these human forms, which serve to add a real sense of the unknown in Ropp's mysterious world.

William Ropp is a masterful artist and photographer, who approches his subject matter in a way which is quite different than most photographers we have reviewed on Profotos. While most photographers attempt to produce flattering images of their models, which accentuate their bodies beautiful shapes and curves, Ropp's approach to exploring his subjects is to contort their bodies into bizarre shapes and forms. The results of this approach are nothing less than astonishing. The magnificent aesthetic beauty of Ropp's images is without a doubt, nothing short of the work of a master photographer.

Mystery and intrigue await while you enter the portfolio of this most ingenious photographer. We invite you to browse the gallery of one of this generation's greatest photographers of the human body - William Ropp.,I know William Ropp's pictures, those he has not yet taken and those he will never take. Those he most often exhibits are of naked bodies, as smooth as fish, with no opening to be found. Their mouths are sealed shut so that no words can escape. When they open, they are dark chasms, delivering silent screams.

Their nostirls don't breathe. Their eyes never look at you, but at something in front of you or at something at your side so that they don't have to communicate. In his relentless search for the other, William Ropp runs into the impenetrable barriers of skin and silence. Adults with hallucinating eyes, children who have lost their innocence, all have withdrawn into themselves. The artist pulls on their flesh in vain. He deforms their bodies but can't open them to release their souls. In the dark, in vain, he uses a ray of light as a laser to cut out a palpitating bit of flesh. It can't be done. No light penetrates, he can onlly sculpture shadow. Sometimes, a bluish vein can be seen, when it is just under the skin. But it is impossible to go deeper, impossible to dig further. One even wonders if there is any skeleton to hold up the weight of these gelatinous packages, these human jellyfish.

And so, to take revenge, the photographer imprisons his models in cages of solitude. If he can't reach them, no one else will either. He envelopes them in a thick fog or wraps them in a labyrinth of veils. Or he isolates them in a pile of steel rafters, in ancient ruins, in burning deserts...Thus William Ropp exerts his godlike power, freezing the other forever in a casing of crystal.

Tomorrow he will use other magic to continue his quest: tones and colors, symmetries, abstractions, writings, monsters, and chimera, split personalities and crowds... The paths to explore are innumerable. But we can be sure that nothing will ever satisfy him: we will never find William there where Ropp is lost.

--Michel Spielmann