The Face of the Leper

The leper's face is the gold sliver of the sun.  Gold lives in decay, the dead materia, whose navel pierces through to the sun.  The sun is like a leper's face.  The eyes of deformation pricking out from beneath the flesh, the severing images of sunspots.  This is why the leper is a reviled and sacred soul in medieval myth.  The lustful sinner whose filth is the embodiment of both his past ills and of his purification.  His soul lives upon the face of his body, he is not alive, nor dead, for the deformed are between worlds.  His body is a living memory, a road and a relic, a path that leads to ultimate purification, to the realm of God.  He is cursed with blackened flesh, for his soul is black, and this curse is his salvation, for unlike the rest, his salvation lives upon his flesh.  And this is why people used to place gold or silver masks over the leper's face, over any deformity of the body.  Not necessarily to hide it, but to embody in physical terms its holy qualities and to acknowledge the sunspots and specks of the divine speaking through these wounds. 

(image from http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2010/01/philadelphia-medical-film-symposium.html)

Liberation of the Fingers by Dieter Appelt

"Liberation of the Fingers"

Clearing I and Alfred Tuteinbest by Herbert Pfostl

"Clearing I"

"Alfred Tuteinbest"

see more of his works here...  http://papergraveyard.blogspot.com/

Pig Jawbones. New Guinea.