French artist Thomas Mailaender sunburns photographs onto skin

French artist Thomas Mailaender is putting a new spin on the old trope of the body as a canvas. For his most recent book, Illustrated People, Thomas applied 23 negatives of archival photographs onto his subjects’ bodies and used a UV lamp to sear the images onto their skin. This process of temporarily transferring negatives onto skin has a similar effect to sunburn, although the fleeting images begin to fade as soon as they are exposed to daylight. Juxtaposing colour photographs of his sunburn shots with black and white archival imagery, Thomas’ jarring, pink-skinned portraits are seen on arms, backs, stomachs and legs in a 128-page hardcover publication with a befitting red sleeve.