A unique book of photographs, portraits of a sort that Miyako Ishiuchi made of scars on women's bodies. We never see the faces of her subjects, only the marks that remain on their bodies. The black-and-white photographs have been processed to make the contrast quite neutral, leaving little difference between the subject's skin, lit only by natural light. For Ishiuchi these scarred bodies represent a kind of purity. In her afterword, Goddesses of Scars, she writes that if one can live only by being hurt, scars on the skin are proof of being alive, and that scars on a woman's body are a heavy form of time. She had assumed that women with scars were somehow close to absolute innocence, and making the book let her see the question she carried over from her earlier series 1-9-4-7. In a text that accompanies the book, translated into English, she states that, just as self, individuality and the like seem silly and inconsequential when piled on the plate of time, so youth and age, beauty and ugliness on the surface of the body are pretty much just two sides of the same coin. Innocence is a carefully considered study of the female body, from a perspective that is not often represented.