Double take: a modern, fashion-led spin on the nude from Charlotte Heal and Mark Sanders

“Look and look again,” says Charlotte Heal. Taking shape and form as its starting point, her recent collaboration with photographer Mark Sanders and stylist Ruth Higginbotham stems from an interest in images that force you to look twice. Mark – whose newspaper format project Urbis we featured last year – recently got in touch to share the personal project the pair have worked on together.

Contours places closely cropped images side by side so that the lines of the bodies in each line up perfectly, so that the curve of a back in one shot might turn into the curve of a back in another, or the line of an arm might turn into the neckline of a jumper in another. The image pairings include one nude and one clothed shot, and the project’s fleshy compositions are balanced by a stripped back palette of white, pink, red and blue. “In a sense it’s our modern take on the nude,” Charlotte explains.