SKIN AND UNDER II — Corpus Exemplare
The first volume began with an observation: young men from Latin America, photographed across different cities and years, kept arriving at the camera in similar configurations. A particular set of the jaw. A way of holding the chest. Colombia, France, Italy, 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.
Bogotá, Santa Marta, Ciénaga, the Páramo de Santurbán, Medellín—cities and landscapes I had already worked in, revisited with a harder question in hand. The familiarity did not make the work easier. It made the clichés more visible, and harder to justify photographing again without knowing why.
Corpus Exemplare starts where that work could not resolve. The first book asked: what does a man look like when the performance stops? This one inherits a harder question: whose idea of stopping is this? The assumption that stripping away one set of conventions reveals something truer may be its own convention. The project continues because I am not sure it isn’t.
The title is built to misbehave. Read one way, corpus exemplare names a specimen—a body catalogued, studied, held up as evidence. 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.
The photographs are staged. I construct the frame, the light, the terms of encounter. The image does not pretend to capture 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 tell it through staging.
The methodology shifted 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 had set it up, chosen the place, handed them the cameras—but I could stop being the person they were performing for. What came out was uneven, raw. Men who had not been asked before. 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.
Two men who left Russia enter the book, and neither was photographed there. 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 countries 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. The decision that followed: to leave. Two men, two ways of carrying the same history—one behind a borrowed name, one standing fully inside his own.
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. I have decided to leave that tension visible rather than resolve it.
Osaka works inside a culture where restraint is the script—where withholding is not silence but its own form of address. I don’t yet know what the camera finds there. That is the reason to go.
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. Sometimes it is slack, unglamorous, unresolved. The methodology 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 long enough to find it.
The work continues through 2026 and into 2027. It is not finished, and I don’t write this to tell you what it means. I write it because I still don’t know.
Corpus Exemplare, then, in both senses at once: a study, and a claim.
