Light on Skin

There’s a specific kind of photographer who builds a career on the willingness of beautiful women to undress for him. Richard Kern, Terry Richardson, Keiichi Nitta—the lineage is long and the mechanics are understood by everyone involved. The question worth asking isn’t whether the work is exploitative—it probably is, somewhere, to some degree—but whether it’s also something else. Whether the gaze accumulates into an actual vision.

Insuh Yoon was 24 when I first came across his work: a South Korean student freshly arrived in New York, shooting in natural light in the way that feels either effortless or painstakingly constructed to look that way. The softness in his images isn’t sentimentality—it’s closer to reverence, which is a different thing. His subjects look at the camera with an ease that suggests they’re not just tolerating the lens but actively cooperating with it.

Being masculine also means having an admiration for the female body, he said, with the particular calm of someone who has thought about this enough to stop apologizing for it. I’ve always been drawn to the beauty of women. There’s nothing revelatory in the statement—it’s the oldest reason in photography—but the honesty of saying it plainly carries its own weight. Half the photographers working in this tradition are so busy performing detachment that the desire itself leaches out of the work. Yoon doesn’t bother with that performance.

His models apparently adore him. His peers describe him as charming and funny. I believe both things; the images carry an intimacy that comes from trust rather than from power. What I keep returning to is the light, the stillness, the sense that these women exist somewhere unhurried and pleasant, and that the camera caught them there without forcing it. In the tradition he’s working in, that’s rarer than it should be.