Gabi Sciafani and I have collaborated to bring a new dimension to my work photographing altered states of the skin. In some sense this begins a new, independent project of using macro photography to explore all of the marks we bear. And that’s what I’ve been calling it, Marks We Bear. In another sense, this project is continuous. The colors you see in Gabi’s photographs are not altered from “reality.” They are the effects, unusual to be sure, of the particular lighting I’d arranged. So you might ask if Gabbi’s skin is luminously metallic blue and purple, and I’d be in the clear saying that it is. Gabi herself explains the reality. She begins:
My skin is stretched in certain places – long fingers of striated flesh that wrap around my hip bone, thighs and calves more subtly patterned with horizontal lines. Once angry red, they have faded to mere whispers of what they were. Yet to my touch they are the same as ever, textured silk.