LAURENT ELIE BADESSI

“SKIN”

In his photographs, Badessi emphasizes the human body as a mirror of nature by placing nudes in dramatic landscapes and melding contrast of textures and shapes into images of natural beauty. With elegant minimalism, he extrapolates the harmony between opposites of black and white, man and nature, fluid curves and straight lines. Unity emerges from the difference and similarities between the body and nature itself. He juxtaposes human bodies of all types with natural elements to produce unexpected encounters.

Harmony through contrast. A skull, a knee, an outstretched arm, a hand, a back, a belly of a pregnant woman. Badessi assembles these bodies and takes them apart again, thus giving birth to forms that are often graphic and abstract. He is like a sculptor, fashioning the body with his hands, chiseling it with his lens, using the lines as raw material for integrating everything into a coherent whole.

The appeal of this unique work on human form is complemented and enhanced by the contribution of 63 world-famous artists and personalities from the fields of art, fashion, film, dance, music and literature, each of whom has dedicated a very personal, handwritten and signed commentary to a selected photograph. The result is SKIN, a beautiful hardcover book published by Edition Stemmle from Switzerland, and distributed in the United States by Abbeville Press.

Among the text contributors are Pedro Almodovar, Agnes b., John Bartlett, Peter Beard, Pierre Cardin, Brigitte Bardot, Anna Sui, Henry Buhl, Larry Rivers, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, Bill T. Jones, Karl Lagerfeld, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Louis Dumas Hermès, Todd Oldham, Charlotte Rampling, Andres Serrano, Anne Rice, Susan Sontag, John Waters, Robert Wilson and many others.

The foreword of this book is written by Sondra Gilman, Chairman and founder of the department of photography of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.