I do not find the human body intrinsically beautiful.  But I want to be clear, I don't mean to say that I find it ugly.  The body is no more ugly than a lump of clay. A lump of clay on the sculptor's pedestal is neither beautiful nor ugly, it is a mass with potential beauty. It's beauty lies in what it can become.  The same is true for the body.  It is the things it can do-the shapes it can aspire to and become-that is beautiful.

There is a German word that, for me, succinctly defines the source of the body's potential beauty.  The word is Bauplan.  I encountered it many years ago while studying invertebrate zoology.  Like so many dense academic German nouns the English translation of Bauplan sprawls out before us:  "The word means, literally, 'a structural plan or design,' but a direct translation is not entirely adequate… The concept of a Bauplan really captures in a single word the essence of both the structural range and architectural limits, as well as the functional aspects of a design."

My work explores the human Bauplan.  But these images are not austere architectural shapes, they are forms laid over with the intense warmth of flesh-the sensual.  These are tricky waters.  The sensual so easily slides into the sexual, and the sexual distracts us from the beauty of the Bauplan.  My work strives to show that a back can be beautiful because of the structure of the ribs when held with a particular tension, or because this muscle, over here, works in an elegant opposition to the line of the arm, over there.  I want the viewer to appreciate the structure and sensuality of the human Bauplan-regardless of gender, regardless of sex.

Epikoinos, the title of this group of photographs, is the Greek origin of the English word "epicene".  Epikoinos literally means that which is upon, near, or approaching the common - specifically what is common between the genders.  An epicene word is one that has a single form to refer to either the male or the female (in Latin bos means a bull or a cow).  Likewise, these images serve to express in a single form a common Bauplan.  The body is abstracted, isolated in a black field that gives no clue to time, place, personality, or gender. This isolates, and focuses our attention on, the body's realized potential for beauty.