In My Skin by Michelle Sank is a socially anthropological project developed in the United Kingdom, formally begun around 2012 but including earlier portraits from 2008 and 2009. The series examines people under 25 as they navigate body image, identity, and physical transformation.
The project delve into the cultural pressure placed on young adults in early twenty-first-century Western society, when magazines, advertising, television, and online social networks increasingly circulated narrow ideals of appearance. Sank frames this pressure not only as a matter of fashion or self-presentation, but as a social condition that shaped how young people understood acceptability, vulnerability, and control. Her subjects include individuals considering or undergoing cosmetic procedures, those affected by eating disorders or body dysmorphia, and young people navigating gender transition.
This concern extends Sank's broader practice in social documentary photography. Born in Cape Town and based in the United Kingdom since 1987, she has often worked with people positioned at the edges of dominant social narratives, drawing on her own experiences of adolescence, migration, and life under apartheid. In In My Skin, that biographical awareness informs a measured, nonjudgmental approach: the series asks why young people feel compelled to alter, hide, discipline, or affirm their bodies, rather than treating those choices as spectacle.
Visually, the portraits are staged in bedrooms, where furniture, clothing, posters, mirrors, bedding, and personal objects become part of the subject's self-presentation. The compositions are generally still and frontal, often centering the figure within a small domestic space. Sank works in color, using the textures of skin, fabric, walls, and decorative objects to create a charged but intimate atmosphere. The bedrooms function as both shelter and stage, suggesting the tension between private uncertainty and the performance of an emerging self.
Sank’s use of a medium format camera, chromogenic C-type prints, sharp focus, natural light, and fill-in flash gives both figure and room a clear, deliberate presence.
The project reached wider audiences through exhibitions in 2013, including Galerie Ron Mandos in Amsterdam and Unseen Photo Fair. It also received an Honorable Mention from UNICEF and Second Prize, Single Image, at the 2012 LensCulture Exposure Awards for Roland, 19 years old - alias Lady Gaga, an image from the series.
