What a Dentist’s Camera Sees

Berlin will show you a pussy at any hour if you know where to look, and often even when you don’t. This is not a complaint.

Photographer Peter Kaaden shares my appreciation for the female body’s more intimate geography. His exhibition Naaked, which opened at STUDIOLO Berlin near Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg last weekend, drew the usual Berlin mix of media and music people, who stood around with cold drinks in front of very large, very detailed photographs of women’s bodies. The specific detail: he shot everything with a dental camera. Literally his dentist’s camera, a device designed for peering into mouths, pointed somewhere else entirely.

I wanted to try the device on things I like, like naked bodies, Peter said. Suddenly I could see details I’d never seen before. I was closer to those bodies than ever. There’s something genuinely odd about that—the clinical instrument hijacked for desire, the teeth-examining apparatus applied to labia and folds and soft curves nobody expected it to document. The images land somewhere between medical record and something you want on your wall, which is precisely what Peter is selling: an oversized, extremely close-up vulva above the couch. Respect the vision.