Strange Skin

These photographs were made over a number of years through collaborations with more than one hundred volunteer models. Participants ranged widely in age, body type, gender identity, and personal history. Most had little or no prior modeling experience.

The sessions followed a simple and consistent structure. Using a single fixed light source, a small platform, and a handheld camera, the work explored the body through sustained attention and physical proximity. Rather than directing elaborate performances, the process emphasized gradual trust, physical awareness, and the unfolding of ordinary bodily presence. Faces and eyes were often excluded, not to erase individuality, but to shift attention away from portraiture and toward the body itself as a shared human condition.

The photographs in this sequence were made using a first-generation Lytro camera, an early commercial light-field system capable of recording spatial and focus information differently from conventional cameras. Its unusual optical characteristics—particularly at close range—became central to the development of the work.

The camera performed best within a narrow focal range, often leading to photographs being taken from the surface of the model’s skin. This proximity shaped both perspective and presence. Limbs expanded disproportionately. Spatial relationships softened or collapsed. Depth became unstable. The resulting images often feel less conventionally photographic than physically encountered.

The camera’s small square format and low-resolution image files also shaped the atmosphere of the work. Fine detail frequently dissolves into softness, compression, grain, and tonal drift. Rather than resisting these characteristics, the project gradually embraced them as part of its visual language. The body appears not as a perfectly resolved object, but as something closer to sensation: partial, tactile, atmospheric, and continually shifting at the edge of recognition.

Although the photographs depict many different individuals, the work gradually moved away from identity as its primary subject. Over time, recurring gestures, postures, tensions, and forms began to emerge across bodies. Differences remained important, but so too did the recognition that vulnerability, gravity, aging, intimacy, exposure, and physical presence are conditions shared by all human beings.

The project ultimately became an attempt to look at the body outside many of the visual systems through which it is commonly interpreted: glamour, idealization, performance, spectacle, shame, or the reduction of the body to an erotic object. Instead, the work asks what may become visible when bodies are encountered slowly, closely, and without hierarchy.

The photographs are neither portraits nor abstractions, but records of embodied presence held somewhere between the familiar and the strange.

— Bradley R. Milton

Strange Skin comes from the German phrase fremde Haut, introduced to me by one of the participants in this work. In German swinging culture, Lust auf fremde Haut—literally, “a desire for strange or unfamiliar skin”—refers to the pleasure of a new encounter, the discovery of another body.