Hands that make things
A year photographing the hands of people who make things for a living, and nothing else.
Luca Bianchi
3 min read
You can tell a great deal about a person from their hands. The calluses of a carpenter, the burns of a baker, the clay-dried cracks of a potter. For a year, I photographed the hands of people who make things for a living, and nothing else.
Why hands
Portraits of faces are about identity. Portraits of hands are about work. I became interested in hands after photographing a potter for a magazine and realising that the best photograph from the whole day was not of her face but of her hands, covered in slip, pulling up the wall of a bowl.
I found my subjects through word of mouth: a baker told me about a weaver, who told me about a blacksmith, who told me about a carpenter.
