Photography
Why I Still Print Black & White on Gelatin Silver Paper (And Why You Should Too) I’ve received quite a few questions lately about why I still print my black-and-white photographs on traditional gelatin silver paper. In an age in which almost everything passes through a digital workflow, working with fiber-based paper, liquid chemistry, trays
I asked Stefano to compose the music for Skin and Grace. I wasn’t just approaching an extraordinary composer, but one of my closest friends from youth. We met at twelve or thirteen, in piano lessons, and shared many of those years when you grow up together. After high school came our first musical experiments with
The Becoming is a separate longitudinal work that emerged during the production of Gazing Soft. The first book and documentary follow four adult professional dancers. Skin and Grace – Episode IIThe Becoming During our time at the Escuela Nacional de Ballet, another possibility emerged. We met senior students, sixteen and seventeen years old, whose training
A reflection on what happens when the human body resists the categories that contemporary culture expects it to occupy. The Semantic Void. (When the Body Has No Category) I printed Skin and Under in Italy, at Tipografia Sosso. The technicians handled the proofs — pages full of nudes — with the same ease they would
During a four-day shoot, something was said — aimed at the only woman in a group of eight nude male models. I wasn’t there when it started. By the time I arrived, the men had closed ranks. Against Juan, I later gathered. At dinner I asked. Got only careful vagueness. The matter was theirs to
I photograph bodies. But not the way that phrase usually lands. A body is never just a body. It arrives already inscribed — by the culture it grew up in, the labor it performed, the gender it was assigned or chose, the food it ate, the sun it worked under, the touch it was or
I work with the body.Not to provoke, not to decorate, but to stay close to something honest. Today I had a conversation that quietly reminded me why this matters to me.A model told me he admired my work, but that full nudity wasn’t something he felt comfortable with. I respected that immediately. A body is
Bored of Very Serious Photography? Nothing on your skin. A reflection on safety as an aesthetic in contemporary photography, and on the consequences of treating beauty with suspicion. When I look at much of the “in-vogue” contemporary photography, I don’t feel rejection. I feel boredom. A deep boredom—not born of any intolerance for the new,
SKIN, and Grace — Episode IGazing Soft Book and Film I arrived in Cuba intending to photograph five professional dancers, drawn to a grace I had previously known only through screens and fleeting digital fragments. Four ultimately became the subjects of this book and documentary. I wanted to photograph their bodies, but also to discover
Archaeology of Future Ruins The Proto-Digital Proletariat Sometimes I think my models belong to a “proto-digital proletariat”: young men raised in a world where nudity is no longer taboo but currency, translated into tokens and likes on webcam platforms. A hyperconnected global underclass that has turned the body-image into its only capital in the ruthless
