In her photographic work, Josephine Pryde (1967, Alnwick, United Kingdom) uses various visual, thematic and compositional devices that reappropriate the codes of fashion and stock photography in order to subvert them. This set of photographs belongs to the artist’s 2014–ongoing series Für mich (For me), which presents closely cropped images of hands interacting with touch-sensitive objects or being placed on the chests of their owners. The brightly coloured nail polish worn by the subjects draws attention to the points of contact between hand and object. Reminiscent of commercial photography, the images highlight our increasingly intimate and dependent relationships with these technologies, which have in many ways become extensions of our bodies.

In Küsse sind das (Kisses are that, 2014), for instance, we see a pair of hands wearing purple nail polish and holding an inexpensive dimmable light, controlled by touching its surface. The project was partly inspired by Pryde’s experience on examination boards in her capacity as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she witnessed candidates’ responses to the commission’s question: ‘Why do you want to study art?’ The candidates often responded, ‘I want to do it for me,’ and in some cases put their hand on their chest to identify themselves as the ‘me’ in question.