Just Skin

My back looks like it’s been through a full nuclear weapons program. I could spend money on Clearasil or wait for acne to become beautiful. Everything’s beautiful these days, anyway.

British photographer Sophie Harris-Taylor was thinking something similar—or at least taking it seriously. Her series Epidermis is photographs of girls and their skin, exactly as it shows up: Louise, Indiana, Joice, and whatever acne or marks or irritations they’re carrying. It’s pushing back on the whole only-perfection-matters thing we do—the way photographs only show flawless skin and perfect bodies, like the rest of us are failing for having actual human bodies.

Sophie came at this from somewhere real. She spent years hating her own acne, went through the puberty thing and way beyond it, wanted normal skin—the kind that appears in magazines. Eventually she figured out that normal is just whatever’s in the pictures around you. We learn what’s acceptable from images. Change the images and normal shifts.

That’s almost too basic to say out loud. Everyone knows beauty standards are invented, that we’re shaped by media, all of that. But there’s a difference between knowing something and actually seeing it. These photographs of skin that’s just skin, marked by time and luck and biology, hit different. Not a problem waiting for a solution, not proof you’re failing. Just the surface of a body being itself.