Skin Deep
Erwin Olaf's Most Sensual Nudes
When photographer Erwin Olaf looks back at his past works, he sees a diary. His “Skin Deep” series, which he considers an “unsuccessful chapter,” documents a specific time in his life that he reflects on with a tinge of sorrow and regret.
“I have not always added a successful chapter to my diary,” he explains in his artist statement. “Sometimes I was too aggressive, too sexually frustrated, too jealous or too unhappy to maintain enough critical distance, and there are photos or photo series that I now look back on with some sorrow and regret slipped through.”
For Olaf, “Skin Deep” is about acknowledging the sentiments that moved him most profoundly at the time when he was working on the series.
“In the end, this work is just as precious to me as the work I’m really proud of. It belongs to me, it’s what I am, what I think, what I feel,” he writes.
“I made the ‘Skin Deep’ series… to celebrate the beauty of the human body and the centuries-old tradition in art of depicting it naked. Nothing fascinates me more than human skin. Smooth and often seemingly hairless, it has been a source of inspiration since I first held a camera. The way light and shade play on this, the largest organ of our body, continues to fascinate me. And every day I’m still surprised at how it is that we all know that others have genitals and we can more or less visualize them, yet there is a huge taboo about these parts of the body.
“Taking it a step further, for years I’ve been amazed that looking at a man’s nipple is fine, whereas a woman’s nipple is a forbidden area. In the same way the smile in photography has been stolen by the advertisement, so have the genitals been stolen by pornography.
“…There is nothing better than feeling good in your own skin and now and then making love brilliantly and with total abandon.”
