About Skin

About Skin propones circa 50 full-page shots by the Italian-Jordanian photographer Mustafa Sabbagh. Along with photos of landscapes, fashion, and still lifes, the portraits of people (both professionals or random individuals) reveal, above all, right from the first pages, the book’s true theme: human skin. In fact, far from the reigning and by now unavoidable practice of photo touch-ups, Sabbagh nonchalantly works among the glossy context of fashion photography, though highlighting subjects which celebrate, through sensitive research, the natural imperfections of the epidermis. About Skin therefore unveils – among stylized landscapes and languid flowers – a theory of moles, scars, reddened skin, veins, wrinkles, stretch marks, signs left by clothing: an atlas that, on the one hand, refers the observer to North European painting from the 1500s and 1600s (for example, Dutch still lifes and Nordic Renaissance portraits) and, on the other, to contemporary photos by Wolfgang Tillmans, Jurgen Teller, and Rineke Dijkstra.