Inspired by a skeleton used as a teaching aid in the 1990s, Robert Francois has spent months working with dis-articulated human skeletons creating works that are both beautiful and haunting.

After painstakingly arranging the  bones  into striking, iconic shapes, each five or six feet wide he photographs them with a 4×5 Hasselblad rigged to a boom to provide a bird’s eye view. Each shot takes a full day to set up. “I was on my knees for all of 2008,” Robert remembers. 

He confesses that more than anything else he is motivated by the fear of death. “The bones are something left behind, a form of memory,” he says. “I try to treat that person on my studio floor with respect”.

More than that, the powerful works set out to remind people of the consequences of violence.

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