Body Contact is a series of images produced in collaboration with the artist Claudia Kappenberg. They are unique photogram-photographs, made using multiple exposures. Negative images or simply white light was projected from an enlarger on light-sensitive paper, with or without bodies and other objects placed directly on it. Previously exposed imagery shows up in the shadow area that was underneath the object or person.

This project emerged from experiments done while working in a photo lab in 1986. Every day at start up, a throw-away print had to be passed through the large-format Cibachrome processor. Instead of just processing unexposed paper, the artist found a fast way to make a print by climbing on the paper and exposing it beforehand. The play of shadows that resulted on these “Cibagrams” was unexpected and often surprising. For the artist it was the recording or the residue of a performance, the play between body and light.

This experimentation stuck with the artist and a decade later seemed right for this collaborative exploration. The technique was pushed further: bodies are fused and multiplied; scale is shifted and other imagery added; silhouetted bodies are filled with the skin and structure of other bodies. The result was a new way of articulating and representing an intimate proximity between two bodies.