Crave is about appetite. The series photographs erotic pleasure through the senses: the warmth of skin, the slow weight of a liquid sliding across it, an open mouth, an eye that looks back. In The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes separated plaisir, the pleasure that comforts, from jouissance, the bliss that unsettles. Crave moves between the two. The camera comes close, close enough for the body to become texture and heat.

The nude has long been a genre of distance: the body seen whole, from far enough away to be judged. Crave gives up that distance. At this range the eye stops surveying and begins to work like the other senses. This kind of looking starts in the body before it reaches thought.

Honey falls from a wooden dipper and gathers in the hollow of a belly, the whole frame glowing amber. A pale liquid runs down a back and over the curve of the hips, caught in hard black-and-white light like rain on stone. An open mouth surfaces from total darkness. A woman leans against a wall bathed in violet light while her reflection in the mirror turns and looks straight at the viewer. An eye watches from a small green screen above a body softened into blur.

Crave draws on two traditions. One is the chiaroscuro of baroque intimacy, where skin emerges from darkness into a single source of light and flesh and shadow carve each other. The other is the chromatic photography that followed Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans, where colour itself carries the mood. In Crave the two meet: honey-warm ambers and reds, the artificial glow of violet and green, and black and white that turns skin and liquid into pure contrast. The framing stays tight, cropping the body to the place where sensation happens.

Georges Bataille, in Erotism (1957), described eroticism as the moment when a body briefly escapes its own separateness. Audre Lorde, in "Uses of the Erotic" (1978), claimed the erotic as a source of knowledge and power, something to be trusted rather than hidden. Between these two positions, Crave treats pleasure as a way of knowing the body from the inside, through taste, touch, and the act of looking.

Desire also lives in what stands in its way. In other images, smoke, fogged glass, and coloured light slip between two bodies, and the photographer becomes a witness arriving a moment too late, catching the heat of something that has just happened, or is about to. In Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, desire lives in waiting: a relation to what almost, but not quite, arrives.

The gaze matters as much as the touch. For most of its history the nude was made for a viewer who could look without being seen. When a figure in Crave looks straight into the lens, or a reflection turns to meet the viewer's eye, that arrangement breaks: looking becomes mutual, and the viewer becomes one of the people in the room.

Susan Sontag ended Against Interpretation (1964) by calling for "an erotics of art." Crave takes her at her word: it asks to be felt before it is explained.