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 and the clichés stayed. The subject was a recurring posture with no single origin and many authors.
This volume returns to Bogotá, Santa Marta, Ciénaga, the Páramo de Santurbán and Medellín, places I had already worked in, with a harder question in hand. Familiarity made the clichés easier to see, and harder to justify photographing again without knowing why.
The first book asked what a man looks like when the performance stops. This one asks whose idea of stopping that is. The assumption that stripping away one set of conventions reveals something truer may be a convention itself. The project continues because I am not sure it isn’t.
The title is built to misbehave. Corpus exemplare can name a specimen, a body catalogued and held up as evidence, or a model, a body offered as an ideal worth imitating. The book keeps both readings in play. That friction is the subject.
The photographs are staged. I construct the frame, the light and the terms of encounter, and both of us know we are being looked at. The images make no claim to spontaneous truth. I tell stories through staging.
The method 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, and I stayed away. I had chosen the place and handed over the cameras, but I could stop being the person they performed for. The results were uneven and raw: men who had never been asked. One participant said he felt most himself in exactly the kind of staged social performance I had assumed the work was taking apart. The footage stayed with me for months. It belongs in the project unedited into agreement, because a smoothed version would be less truthful.
Two men who left Russia enter the book, and neither was photographed there. In Belgrade, a man chose to leave his name behind. Here 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 to leave. One man appears behind a borrowed name, the other under his own. Oleg’s story also puts masculinity performed openly as performance at the center of the book’s question. Like the Colombian men, both were asked, by a camera or by a country, to be someone in particular.
Video and photographs tell different stories, and the book places them side by side. One is built on a controlled gaze, the other on a relinquished one. I have left that tension visible.
What holds the project together is practice: time, proximity, and the patience to wait for the moment when a man forgets the camera exists. That moment is often slack and unglamorous. The method shows in what the photographs leave out, the readiness and the rehearsed pose. The images ask the viewer to stay long enough to find what is there.
The work continues through 2026 and into 2027, and next leads to Taiwan, where a dancer has invited me to photograph. A dancer has spent years being looked at and arrives with a relationship to the gaze that I did not build. I don’t yet know what that does to the staging. That is the reason to go.
The work is unfinished, and I write this because I still don’t know what it means. Corpus Exemplare, in both senses at once: a study and a model.
