The Right Film for the Right Skin

There’s a warmth that expired or borderline film gives to skin tones that no digital preset has ever quite matched—the chemistry degrading in exactly the right direction, pushing colors toward amber and shadows toward depth. Images start looking like memories rather than records. That’s what the best portraiture is reaching for anyway, and most photographers spend years chasing it with the wrong tools.

Jonathan Leder shoots out of New York, working with women on Polaroid, 6×6, and 35mm, and the results are exactly that—photographs that feel remembered rather than taken. His subjects look unguarded and comfortable in their own skin, which is harder to achieve than it sounds when a camera is pointed at you. It helps that he’s shooting genuinely beautiful women, and that the grain and warmth aren’t there to flatter or obscure but because they’re the right medium for the right subject. The difference between his work and a thousand technically competent nude photographs is that his feel like something actually happened in front of the camera.

I’d bring someone I know in front of that camera without hesitation. His self-portrait on the bio page alone is enough to trust him with that.