SKIN, and Under moves through territories — geographic, cultural, bodily — in search of masculinity as it actually lives: unperformed, unannounced, rooted in specific soil and light and habit.
The project photographs men in the places that shaped them. Not against backdrops, not extracted from context, but inside it — in the landscape, the architecture, the climate of their own belonging. The sessions are staged, but what is sought is natural: the posture a man carries without thinking, the ease or tension in his skin, the way he holds space when no performance is required.
252 pages. 191 photographs. Five writers each invited to choose an image and write their own fiction from it — not to illustrate, but to generate something independent. The image as prompt, not document.
Nudity here is neither performative nor provocative, but instinctive — a quiet fact of skin. Silver gelatin prints, made by hand in the darkroom, slow the image down, insisting on materiality: the body is not a concept but a physical fact.
Published by Artfineline, 2025. $98 + shipping.
ISBN 979-8-218-66660-6
"Skin. And Under. Evolving Young Machos. Or Not."
SKIN, and Grace, Gazing Soft turns from territory to body in motion — the discipline of dance read as its own dialect of masculinity, earned in the body, not staged.
A book and a documentary. The project began as a wider study of dancers and athletes together, but found its true center in four professional dancers from Cuba. Their openness reshaped the work into something more intimate than planned. In the accompanying 60-minute documentary, they speak in their own words: how they began dancing, what it cost them, and — for some — the story of coming out.
The photographs, made alongside those conversations, carry that same openness — the body’s stillness between one position and the next. The documentary, in turn, is movement without choreography for an audience: four men dancing in a spare room, or in the stream of El Nicho’s waterfall, simply because it’s what they do.
96 pages, 77 images — black-and-white with a few in color. Silver gelatin, printed by hand in the darkroom. The same insistence on materiality — the body as physical fact, not concept.
Published by Artfineline, 2026. $80.
ISBN 979-8-9964524-0-8
Skin and Under II — Corpus Exemplare –Expexcted by the end of 2027
Skin and Under II opens where the first volume left its questions unanswered.
Corpus Exemplare is a title built to misbehave. Read one way, it names a specimen — a body catalogued, studied, held up as evidence of something. Read the other, it names a model — the body as example, as ideal, as the thing worth imitating. The book does not resolve which reading is correct. That friction is the subject.
This volume moves further than the first — Colombia again, but also Serbia, Japan, and Vietnam, each chapter its own encounter with a different inflection of masculinity, a different relationship between a man and the culture that named him. The chapters do not argue that these bodies are the same. They argue that looking closely enough at difference reveals a shared grammar underneath it — gesture, posture, the specific ease or unease of being seen.
Russia enters the book twice, and never through the camera traveling there directly. In Belgrade, a man who left Russia chose to keep his name behind him — in these pages he is Alex Navorski, borrowed from the stranded traveler of Spielberg’s The Terminal, a man suspended between one country and the next with no paperwork to say who he is. In Ho Chi Minh City, Oleg spoke on camera, by name and by choice, about the night police raided the venue where he performed in drag — the arrest, the beating, the humiliation that followed, and the decision that followed that: to leave. Two men, two ways of carrying the same history — one behind a borrowed name, one standing fully inside his own.
The Japanese chapter finds a different discipline entirely: a culture where restraint itself becomes a kind of exposure, where what is withheld says as much as what is shown.
Across all of it, the camera stays close to the same conviction that shaped the first book: these are not documents. They are myths in the making — bodies lifted out of the particular and toward the archetype, not to erase the men who carry them, but to ask what persists in a body once the culture around it stops watching.
Corpus Exemplare, then, in both senses at once: a study, and a claim.
