MODERN TRIBE

Modern Tribe · Since 2018

Making the body
our own.

Portraits of tattooed and modified people, exploring identity, transformation and belonging.

Through faces, postures and gestures, I explore the distance between how we choose to appear and how others see us.

Each portrait begins with an encounter. Skin carries signs, but it does not reveal an entire story.

About the series

Since 2018, I have photographed people who transform their appearance through tattoos and body modifications. Modern Tribe explores what it means to inhabit a body whose appearance we have chosen and to expose that choice to the gaze of others.

Against a plain grey background, attention turns to a face, a posture. These gestures matter as much as the marks on the skin. I am interested in what a person chooses to reveal, and in what a photograph leaves unresolved.

The word “tribe” describes a connection between individual paths, rather than a single identity. What brings these portraits together is the desire to make the body one’s own and to find a place among others without giving up that difference.

Laurent Ponce