I have always had a fascination with human skin. We obsess over skin, from the amazing, unscathed perfection of the skin of a newborn baby, to the desperation with which we try to stave off time and its dreaded pimples, wrinkles, and spots, to the ephemera of the wrinkly. paper thin skin of the very old. We despise our every bulge, pock mark, and subtle imperfection we believe mars us and makes us less desirable, but rarely do we see the flaws in others that we believe they must see in us. We are at our most vulnerable when we are naked and there is nothing more intimate than two people together with nothing between them but the slightest bit of air.
And for all of that, skin also drives us apart. Simple differences in pigmentation seem to justify the most brutal inhumanity. From slavery to wars, one of the smallest differences between us has been used as an excuse to kill, exclude, abuse, and subjegate.
But what if you take the pigment out of the equation? Light is essentially energy reflected off of a surface. Our eyes are capable of peceiving a fairly narrow range of that reflected energy and that is what informs our understanding of the reality around us. When we make judgements about other people based on the color of their skin, we are really allowing the small differences in reflected energy caused by minute chemical differences in skin composition to influence our actions and attitudes. If we take the pigment out of the equation, would that allow us to look at one another a different way?
The models that chose to participate in this project cover a range of different ethnicities from light skinned, red headed Irish, to dark skinned Africans and every other shade on the spectrum in between including some with heritage that mixed four different “races”. They range in age from 18 to over 50 and some have skin conditions including alopecia and vitilogo. There is also an assortment of tattos and scars in the mix. They were all photographed using a digital camera that has been converted to record radiation between what we see and what we feel as heat.