“The dog beneath the skin”  “The dog beneath the skin” is the eighteenth story of the book “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”. The story is about a man who discovers all of a sudden that his senses have undergone an extraordinary accentuation. For some unknown reason his sight acquires unlimited extension and precision in his perception of different shades of colour and the details of form; the same applies to his sense of smell and his imaginative skills to the extent that colour and smell become by far the most important and meaningful cognitive sources for him and consequently become more significant than any other form of knowledge. Recognising people from their smell he finds out that there is greater richness, variety and truth there than in any dialectic knowledge. He finds a world incredibly rich in shades and sensation, an objective and totally exposed world where sexual excitement, rage and all the other states of being are immediately revealed.   I created this image in Venice, on the Paglia Bridge. I considered smell and colour as attributes of each person but detached from their form because if true value and knowledge are acquired through smell and through shade then a persons features become totally redundant or of little interesting and are, in any case unreliable. Recognising a hostile or benevolent attitude and a person’s nature through smell must necessarily end up by stripping form and meaning from its surroundings, perceiving substance free from the body and no longer restrained or compressed. I took six shots at 1/6 of the necessary shutter timing, varying focus at each exposition in order to have a close shot of the details and have them in the background at the same time and with the same precision.