All of It Visible

Lauren Peralta was nineteen and already had a better eye than most photographers twice her age. I came across her Flickr stream through a blog I was reading at the time and spent longer there than I’d planned, which is the only metric that matters.

She worked in sharp black and white—the kind of contrast that makes bodies architectural—and her subject was female eroticism handled with a directness that a lot of photographers her age were too nervous to commit to. Some of the work was self-portraiture, which added a layer of something harder to name: not confession exactly, more like a deliberate refusal to hide. The tattoos helped. Everything about her visual language was a little aggressive in the best sense, unwilling to be polite about what it wanted to show you.

There was a specificity to the bodies, the light, the framing—you could tell she was looking at real things, not constructing a mood. The American photography scene in 2009 had a lot of people doing dark, supposedly edgy work that turned out to be aesthetic without substance. Peralta’s wasn’t that.