Intimate X-Ray Portraits of Couples by Ayako Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi

It’s always interesting when artists explore intimacy because of how it affects us all on a primitive and emotional level. Japanese art students Ayako Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi have created a prize-winning photo series of images that explore our relationships with each other in an interesting way – by using x-ray images to strip away the skin, hair, and flesh that we usually associate with intimate contact.

Kanda and Hayashi used full-body x-ray imaging and CT scan systems to picture four different couples as they rested intimately together. The result is a series of ghostly white skeletons tangles in loving embraces. The interesting photos are so striking because the poses they strike represent recognizable human intimacy and closeness, but the x-ray images represent death or clinical, medical coldness. We are trained to take the intimacy we share with our doctors when they x-ray our bodies for granted, which is perhaps why it’s so unsettling to see x-ray images used for actual couple’s photos.

The revealing and unique artwork was part of these students’ thesis project at Musashino Art University. The students also won the Mitsubishi Chemical Junior Designer Award for their creative ideas.

Source: m-kagaku.co.jp (via spoon-tamago)

Intimate X-Ray Portraits of Couples by Ayako Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi

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There is a beast with heart of cold stone that dashes like lightning, shreds flesh from bone. // Bewitched by this beast, I fell to my knees. My mouth babbled madness and mumbled soft pleas. // I stared down the ravenous, gnashing dark maw of a cute cuddly kitten with yarn in its paw

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