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 wasn’t allowed. Before my subject says a word, his skin, his posture, his muscle distribution, his relationship to his own nakedness — all of it is already a document.
I think of the body as a site. A site is a place where things happened, are happening, and can be read. Archaeologists excavate sites. Historians visit sites. I photograph them. But unlike a ruin, a living body can refuse to be read. The inscription is never simply legible. It requires permission.
When I travel to Colombia, Cuba, Georgia — I’m not importing a universal aesthetic of the male body and applying it there. I’m going to a specific site and reading what that culture has written onto the men who grew up inside it. The Colombian fisherman’s body is not the Havana dancer’s body is not the Eastern European subject I’m now pursuing. Each carries different inscriptions: different relationships to display, to labor, to softness, to pride, to shame.
Trust is the method. Not waiting — building. The days before the shoot, the shared meals, the conversations that never pretend toward therapy. I’m not there to extract vulnerability. I’m there to make it safe enough that it might appear on its own. And because it must appear freely, it can also refuse to appear. Of nearly a hundred subjects, only a few have held a wall I could not pass. I left them out of the frame — not as punishment, but because a photograph that requires willingness cannot survive compulsion.
I’m not photographing the performance of masculinity. I’m photographing what becomes visible when someone stops performing. The body as site is inexhaustible. Not because I can keep photographing the same body forever. Because the site sometimes closes, and sometimes it opens onto something I didn’t expect — and I photograph that too.
That is why the project keeps going.
