It's rare to come across a conservative sensibility in the spectacle-hungry contemporary art world, but the Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer Mona Kuhn's work with nudes feels like that of a true, unapologetic traditionalist.

"A lot of my photography stems from a desire to go back to the basics," she says. "Humans have always been curious about ourselves, and over the centuries we've worked to depict our lives in so many different ways, from cave paintings to Leonardo's Mona Lisa. My photographs are part of that innate curiosity about defining and re-defining who we are."

In her effort to both capture and add another layer to what it really means to be human, Kuhn focuses on the naked human body. Evidence, a chronicle of a dozen years photographing friends at a nudist colony in southern France, is Kuhn's quiet, chiaroscuro manifesto, in which the male and female forms assume a near-totemic quality. Subtle references to revered works of Western art firmly ground Kuhn's work in the canon (see "Familiar," which pays tribute to Ingres, among others), while her palette of glowing skin and deep, suggestive shadows echoes Old Masters like Rembrandt and Vermeer.

"I love Jenny Saville's work," says Kuhn of the young British artist know for painting monumental, Lucien Freud-like nudes. "I remember her solo show at Gagosian in New York in 1999, and how I felt that, finally, here was someone bringing some respect back to the human body."

Of the nudes in her own work, and how she was able to elicit an uncanny level of comfort and calm from her subjects, Kuhn again sounds a conservative tone, referencing an almost forgotten methodology and approach to art.

"The people in the Evidence photos and I," she says, "share a huge amount of trust."

Sounds almost revolutionary, doesn't it?

Evidence is published by Steidl.