Every Pore, Every Mark

My back looks like it’s been used for nuclear testing. I’ve made peace with it—the alternative involves daily chemical intervention and a level of skincare devotion I’m not prepared to bring. Better to just own it.

British photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor spent time making intimate portraits of people alongside their skin conditions. The series, Epidermis, documents Louise, Indiana, Joice, and others—not as medical subjects, not as before-and-after composites, but as people who happen to have acne, rosacea, cysts, whatever. The photographs are close. That intimacy is the point.

I wanted to create a series that would allow girls to love their skin regardless of what state it’s in, Harris-Taylor said. She’d had her own acne through adolescence and well beyond, and eventually noticed that her idea of "normal" skin had been constructed entirely from images she’d consumed. The photographs push back quietly—not through argument but through sustained looking. You don’t usually stare at someone’s shoulder or neck or jaw in ordinary life. Harris-Taylor makes you do exactly that, and the strangeness of the close attention shifts something.

The photos don’t make a case. They just show you what’s there. That turns out to be sufficient.