Skin Stories & Skin Portraits
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.4.177Keywords:
Illness Narratives, PhotographyAbstract
What personal stories do people with a chronic skin disease have to tell? This was Tanny Dobbelaar's main question in 2001 when she initiated the project “Heftig Vel’’, which may be translated from Dutch as “Severe Skin”. In this essay Dobbelaar shows a selection of what she and photographer Adrienne Norman tried to communicate at that time through a highly hybrid project that has many sides to it. The selection starts with the preface of the book, which was specially designed to enhance the experiences of the subjects in the eyes the viewer. The preface of the book is followed here by several Skin Portraits & Stories of the participants.
This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on 28 August 2015 and published on 12 December 2015.
Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2015 Tanny Dobbelaar

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.