Karass


© Hannah Saunders

These are the people I love.’ She declared. So I looked at the people she loved. What she had trapped in plexiglass, what she trapped like fossil beetles in amber, were the image of a large part of our Karass. There wasn’t a Granfallooner in the collection.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Karass is a body of portraits that questions the way society consumes naked imagery, questioning why we are so disconnected from our own forms.

Vonnegut defined a Karass as “… the tangling of lives… as free-form as an amoeba.”
They are individuals cosmically bound through haphazard divine fate, paths that seem to ziz-zag across the planet shyly to a meeting point and collide at a pre-destined meeting point in time.
My Karass compels me, inspires me, shows me there is kindness in the world at times of despair. These photographs are like jigsaw pieces, my ode to the fantastic individuals in my life.
They are beacons of light, reminding me that we are not simply bodies destined for scrutiny and objectification; we are intelligent, conscious, organic matter suspended on a planet, as we hurtle gloriously through space.

We do not have to follow suit, we are a generation that has the power to take back the authorship of our bodies if we disassemble and rebuild the frameworks we follow.

click to view the complete set of images in the archive