Inked Flesh, Inscribed Futures

Tattooed Histories and the Tactile Gaze in Udit Kulshrestha’s Portraits

In The Skin I’m In, Udit Kulshrestha doesn’t just photograph faces — he renders skin as archive, memory, and manifesto. This series of portraits, transferred by hand onto tanned leather and woven into multi-panel installations, resists the smooth surfaces of conventional photography. Instead, it asks us to look not at the image, but into it — through layers of history, identities, and survival.

The Skin I’m In installation at Wonderwall, India Art Fair, 2025. [Photo: Jeetin Sharma | All Rights Reserved]

The project centers on the Kutiya Kondh women of Odisha, India — members of an Indigenous Adivasi community — whose traditional facial tattoos serve as lifelong inscriptions of identity. These marks, geometric and resolute, were once rites of passage; today, they often provoke ideas of beauty. In Kulshrestha’s hands, however, these tattoos are not exoticised nor explained — they are honored.

Kulshrestha’s portraits, fixed not on paper but on leather, engage the politics of representation at both the aesthetic and material level. Leather — symbolically skin — functions here not merely as support but as a performative surface, invoking what Judith Butler calls the “materialization” of bodies: the process through which identities become legible within social and political frameworks. The work materializes not just faces, but lives — ones that have historically been denied the right to self-representation.

“I am more than what you see on the surface,” — Sharon G. Flake, The Skin I’m In

In Kulshrestha’s project, this sentiment reverberates beyond metaphor. Each panel is a rebuttal to superficial seeing — a confrontation with the politics of skin, caste, and gender.

In the tradition of bell hooks’ “oppositional gaze,” Kulshrestha’s portraits return sovereignty to the subjects themselves. His camera does not capture; it collaborates. The women meet the lens not as ethnographic specimens but as witnesses to their own history. The portraits are composed with care and quietness. There is no dramatic lighting, no staged pathos — just the steady dignity of presence.

Kulshrestha’s use of leather as a photographic substrate imbues the work with visceral power. Its tactile irregularities — creases, scars, and seams — summon what Roland Barthes termed the punctum in Camera Lucida: that which “pricks” or “wounds” the viewer. In this case, it is not a photographic detail that stings, but the very surface itself. Leather, with its own history of violence and utility, forces us to reckon with the corporeal consequences of image-making.

“To photograph is to appropriate… but to photograph is also to affirm.” — Susan Sontag, On Photography

Kulshrestha firmly aligns with affirmation — not of difference as spectacle, but of visibility as justice. These are not just portraits — they are anti-monuments, resisting both digital gloss and ethnographic detachment.

This ethic of touch — what Laura Marks might call “haptic visuality” — draws the viewer into a mode of seeing that is felt as much as observed. The image resists optical consumption. It insists on intimacy. By rejecting the flatness of screen-based imagery, Kulshrestha reclaims photography as an embodied encounter.

Moreover, his work resonates with Ariella Azoulay’s notion of the “civil contract of photography” — a relational ethic between photographer, subject, and viewer. The leather-bound portraits are not static relics; they are living archives, and we, the viewers, are implicated in their preservation.

Kulshrestha does not offer these women as symbols, nor does he decode them. Rather, he positions them as visual agents — figures whose faces speak not only to personal lineage but to collective endurance. Their tattoos, once dismissed as marks of tribal subalternity, now emerge as emblems of defiance, of cultural continuity, of the right to be seen on one’s own terms.

In doing so, The Skin I’m In bridges the intimate and the political, the aesthetic and the ethical. It invites us to confront the structures — visual, social, historical — that shape how we perceive the bodies of others. And crucially, it challenges the viewer to acknowledge that identity is never surface alone. It is stitched, layered, weathered, and lived.