If you think about it, the perfect tan, the one we can never quite achieve, is a matter of light and time. Same principles behind photography. Thomas Mailaender seems to know this very well and decided to take the concept to the extreme.
Born in 1979, Thomas Mailaender is a French multimedia artist who works between Paris and Marseille, known for using techniques ranging from ceramics to photography, from collage to installation. His method, however, always has a common denominator: reuse, recontextualization, the ability to find in archival material a charge still capable of burning.
Illustrated People, made during a year-long residency at the Archive of Modern Conflict in London in 2013, is the project that made him internationally famous. The idea is as simple as it is radical: Mailaender imprinted 23 original negatives from the archive onto the bodies of some models, using a UV lamp. The skin of the subjects thus became the photosensitive material that allows the images to appear physically.
The result is reddened bodies, marked by photographs of war, images of conflict and history that emerge like temporary tattoos, which Mailaender photographs before time makes the image disappear. It lasts as long as a sunburn.
The mechanism chosen by the artist can’t help but bring a smile, even though the thinking behind it is far more complex and profound. The work, in fact, stems from a reflection on how some photographs or memories are so deeply internalized in us that we can see them clearly in front of our eyes when we close them. The body is not just a support: it is involuntary memory, a biological archive, a surface on which time writes without asking permission.
The project was collected in a book published by RVB Books, 128 pages in which the shots from the performance alternate with archival images from the AMC collection. It won the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook of the Year in 2015 and the PHotoEspana Best Photography Book in the international category. The cover is red vinyl: the color, obviously, of a burn.
As we prepare to protect ourselves with sunscreen, it’s worth pausing for a second on this: skin, in summer, becomes a surface on which the world leaves traces. Mailaender has simply decided which ones to choose.
