“You know, I am fed up with how photography is often shown in a frame, and so we should invent new ways to show it, and performance is one way of doing that”
– French artist Thomas Mailaender, creator of Illustrated People, 2015
Thomas Mailaender needed a favour. Having picked out a number of transparent film negatives from the Archive of Modern Conflict he called a few people who “owed me a service of some sort”. With the volunteers ready, Thomas transferred the negatives onto their skin using a special gel and a UV lamp. “The lamp would essentially cause a mild sunburn, bringing the image from the negative to the surface,” he says. “I’d then photograph it to preserve that fleeting moment.”
Thomas called his series Illustrated People.
“For me, people are beautiful when they are not superfluous; I prefer the broken over the superb. It’s a good position to be in life when you accept your essential humanness, when you are not trying to be something that you are not. People may regard this as sad or funny, but I like this melancholic aspect of the human condition. Society puts too much pressure on us to be perfect when in fact everybody smells bad in the arse. We are no better than each other, and this is an attitude I teach my daughters: to lower our standards and simply admit that we are human. I think this is a healthy way to be. I like that art is not perfect, that I can become a geek of imperfection as a way of seeing life.”
– Thomas Mailaender
If you like Thomas’s work you should also enjoy Roller Derby Kisses: Turning Girls’ Roller-Derby Bum Bruises Into Art.
You can see more of Thomas’s work at his website.
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