Frank Lebon’s One Blood Pairs Portraiture With Platelets

The English photographer Frank Lebon has shot Kim Kardashian swathed in yards of elastic for Skims, campaigns for Gucci and Dior, and countless musicians like King Krule and Pretty Sick’s Sabrina Fuentes. But for his debut photo book, the 31-year-old artist is turning his lens on a new subject: blood samples. In One Blood, published by Little Big Man Books, Lebon pairs photos of family and friends with zoomed-in images of their blood samples—plasma, platelets, and all.

Taken between 2020 and 2023, the photographs take Lebon’s tendency toward shooting loved ones and send it into much more extreme territory. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lebon requested his nearest and dearest to prick their fingers and smear some blood onto a glass slide. The supersized images of their blood samples are set against more traditional portraits of the people to whom the blood belongs. For the portraiture part of the project, Lebon requested his subjects place their hands over his flash, creating a sort of reddish filter. “The spark that ignited the idea was originally the spark of a flash, my fingers pressed up against it,” Lebon said in a press release. “The light would shine through my finger and project the red of my blood upon my subject. As with almost anything noteworthy I have ever created, it was birthed from a mistake; my fingers found themselves there as they had nowhere else to go.”

With the release of the limited-edition book, there will also be an exhibition at the New York City gallery Entrance, located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The show will put on view sculptural, framed works and a light and sound installation, running through May 25. Below, Lebon shares some choice images from his monograph—and welcomes his viewers into the family fold.