Skin and Under II — The Gaze (Summer 2027)

SKIN AND UNDER II — The Gaze

The first volume was an attempt — incomplete, as first attempts are. It began with a simple observation: young men from Latin America, photographed across different years and cities, tended to arrive at the camera in similar configurations. A particular set of the jaw. A way of holding the chest. Shot in Colombia, France, Italy, and the United States, the geography changed. The clichés did not. I was not documenting nations; I was noticing a recurring posture with no single origin and many authors. That work tried to find what existed underneath it. Whether it succeeded is something the photographs themselves cannot answer.

Skin and Under II starts from what that work could not resolve. It was shaped by a question — what does a man look like when the performance stops? This one inherits a harder question that emerged from making it: whose idea of stopping is this? The assumption that stripping away one set of conventions reveals something truer, more essential, may be its own convention. The project continues because I am not sure it isn’t.

The photographs in this volume are built on a staged gaze. I construct the frame, the light, the terms of encounter. The image does not pretend to capture a spontaneous truth; it is a deliberate arrangement, a collaboration in which both of us know we are being looked at. I do not repudiate storytelling — I simply tell it through the language of staging.

The methodology deepened when I introduced video. In Guatapé, I gave twelve men cameras and asked them to speak to each other, about themselves, without a script. I stayed away. I could not remove myself entirely — I had set it up, chosen the place, handed them the cameras — but I could stop being the person in the room they were performing for. What came out was uneven, sometimes raw — men who had not been asked before and had things to say. One participant described feeling most himself in precisely the kind of staged, social performance I had assumed the work was dismantling. The footage sat with me for months. It is in the project now, unresolved, because leaving it unresolved is more truthful than any edit that would smooth it over

The video tells a different story from the photographs. It does not replace or correct them. Together they hold a tension: one built on a controlled gaze, the other on a relinquished one. Whether those moments belong to the men or to the project is a tension I have decided to leave visible rather than resolve.

The scope broadens. Tbilisi, where I want to work with Russian men living in displacement — some recently arrived, some years ago — who now inhabit a city that did not entirely choose to receive them. The displacement interests me not as metaphor but as a concrete condition: what you carry across a border, what you perform for strangers, what you quietly set aside. An Asian chapter is under consideration. There are other geographies I have set aside, not because they are exhausted as subjects but because I have not yet found a way to enter them that meets my own ethical standards. That is a limitation of mine, not a judgment on the places.

What holds the project together is not a theory but a practice: time, proximity, the patience to wait for the moment when a man forgets the camera exists. That moment is not always photogenic in the conventional sense. Sometimes it is slack, unglamorous, unresolved. The methodology, if it becomes visible at all, becomes visible in what is absent from these photographs — a certain readiness, a certain pose. The images do not announce their own significance. They ask the viewer to stay with them long enough to find it.

The work continues through 2026 and into 2027. It is an accumulation, a conversation still being had across languages and distances. I expect it to change further before it is finished. I expect it to change me.