Fleurs de Peau Book

In the practice of Dr. X, a dermatologist and sexologist active in Lyon in the early Thirties, there surfaced rugged men with bizarre life stories: Foreign Legionnaires, ex-convicts, artists and sailors. They were all tattooed all over their bodies wing what has been known as part of the underworld code sine Lombroso's The Physiognomy of Crime. The doctor and amateur photographer, who liked to take photos of flowers and landscapes at weekends, was fascinated by the skin illustrations he saw, not as clinical cases but as "secret" works of art. Their diversity, their expressivity and also their particularly ephemeral nature encouraged him to set up a private archive, a sort of "imaginary museum" of the skin. He did something highly unusual in scientific photography at the time, using colour in an autochrome process in which a single colour negative is used on a glass plate. Thanks to the collector's circumspection of the famous Parisian expert on old photographs, Gerard Levy, this remarkable archive of exotic and erotic pictures from the "margins of humanity" has survived, to be published for the first time. Serge Bramly's accompanying essay explains the circumstances under which it was created, making this a valuable find for the connoisseur.