Bodyscapes

My work on nude naked was received quite positively, but with clear room for improvement (largely with the light) and a question of where to take it. I wanted to stay with my own body, stay with the macro, but enhance the ambiguity and move away from the apparent (think of the image of the ankle from the last series). Influential to this direction I was taking were the wise words of John Coplans, particularly the quote regarding alteration of scale, and the resulting transformation of our perception of the subject matter.

I set about making a set of photographs of this nature - these landscapes, or rather 'bodyscapes'. The process was quite straightforward – a plain white background, one umbrella-reflected light above the camera, and then myself and my assistant took our time exploring my body, searching and finding potential images, keeping an eye out for the abstract, the interesting, the unusual etc.

I don't really see this work being about nudity anymore, certainly not in an explicit sense. And as it's so close up and of varying parts of the body, no decisive judgement can be made as to what counts as naked and what doesn't – which I think is just great, especially with the potential to mess with the viewers when they start to get worried or 'grossed out' by what they are looking at. I don't feel that this work is really about humour anymore either, at least not in as obvious a way, there may be undertones, but I think that's now down to the viewers response rather than an intention of mine to incite humour directly.

Below should be a slideshow of all the images, if not working the full set can be viewed here.