Photographer Jean-François Devillers is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Flesh’. To see Jean-François’ body of work, click on any photograph.

FLESH – Naked – Without Nudity

To be naked is to cover oneself in an array of manners, affectations, feints, withdrawals, and offerings. It is to don other clothes to play other roles. What would a naked body be like, entirely deprived of this nudity? A body stripped of its very nudity? Not one returned to a supposedly authentic nature, that libidinal imposture of culture. Rather, a body stripped of its identity, its gender, its attractions. A naked body without a trace of nudity.

This is what this series of images proposes, depicting unknown and intimately familiar creatures. Forms that provoke an exuberance of the imagination where erotic confusion pierces through. Forms that reveal what we want to see, what we fear to recognize, what we would like not to see but are unable to stop ourselves from doing so. An experience of the uncanny of our familiar desires and anxieties. In this way, these images turn the viewer’s gaze back on themselves. Like an image of their psyche.

Genesis: a profoundly moving shock triggered by Edward Weston’s anthropomorphic images of vegetables, and especially Pepper No. 30.

Process: sketches, film photography, scanning of negatives, digital assembly of files. A distillation of different imaging techniques”