Contact by Gabriele Basilico was conceived for a 1978 Lodi exhibition and pairs design chairs with their marks on a woman's skin; one work is dated Milan 1978, while the complete project appeared in 1984. The invitation arrived when Basilico was beginning his professional career, although he already photographed architecture and industrial design. Instead of adopting the polished still-life conventions of product photography, he developed a staged sequence centered on the physical relationship between an object and its user.
The idea arose from the patterned impressions that textured beach chairs leave on bathers' bodies. Reconstructing this everyday effect in the studio, Basilico approached the skin mark as a provisional "contact negative" through which the chair's surface became temporarily readable on the body. The project therefore examines contact, pressure, bodily discomfort, and the capacity of design to condition physical experience. It also introduces a temporal puzzle: the chair and the resulting imprint appear separately, leaving viewers to reconstruct the unseen interval of sitting, pressure, and removal. Basilico described this departure from conventional object photography as symbolic, ironic, and free in form.
The complete suite consists of 24 black-and-white photographs arranged as 12 diptychs. Each pairing places a chair or its patterned surface beside the corresponding impression on a nude female model. The repeated pairings establish a measured rhythm of cause and effect, while raking light makes the skin's relief-like textures legible. Basilico produced the sequence in a studio using Polaroid PN55/55 negative-positive material. A museum example survives as small square gelatin-silver prints, while later exhibitions presented enlarged 60 × 80 cm images.
The project first entered book form through Imagommage in Milan in 1984, with texts by Alessandro Mendini and Achille Abramo Saporiti and graphic design by Maurizio Zanuso. A 2006 In Camera edition, initiated by Marco Bianco, added Basilico's foreword and renewed the work's circulation. Contact subsequently appeared in Basilico's 2006 Paris retrospective, Italics at Palazzo Grassi in 2008–09, and complete presentations in Turin and Madrid in 2009. Its inclusion in the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea's 2013 survey of Basilico's early work encouraged further reassessment of the project.
