Review: Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction: Ch 4: Photography and the human body , 4th ed, 2009

Wikipedia: 19th cent. post-mortem photography

The Subject as Object:  Photography and the human body

Michelle Henning - lecturer in Dept of Culture, Media, and Drama at University of the West of England, Bristol

The author begins by noting the academic interest in the 80s and 90s in photographic perceptions and portrayals of the body (to which she has presumably contributed).  Among the issues of concern were gender, ageing, race, and sexuality, and the role of photography in the generation of desire.  Emergence of these concerns was tied to political issues of the same categories.  By the 21st century concern had turned to designer genetics, cloning, posthuman cyborgs and the translation of the body into data.

Cites Carol Vance’s “The Pleasures of Looking” [found, but not yet read] as important in describing the connection between ideas of the body and ideas about how how photographs are used, basically as a means of controlling identity and defining acceptable practices.

The chapter is organized thematically rather than chronologically

Embodying Social Difference
Photography was born in an era interested in phrenology and physiognomy, the idea that people and groups of people could be defined by exterior appearances.  Henning sees photography in service of means of social and political control, delineating characteristics of the ruling classes as well as those who were ruled.

Historian John Tagg discusses the role of photography as a means of disciplining people, by which he means how power holders use photography to watch, identify, classify, analyze, and correct the populace.  The study of such disciplinary uses entails consideration of the ways in which people are recorded, arranged for the camera, made available for inspection, and placed within classification systems.   Today digital photographs, fingerprinting, iris scans, and other biometric systems represent the body as data to be sorted and classified.  Henning mentions “illegible bodies,” those historically on the social margins whose bodies do not fit the typical profile and so are difficult to read.  [I recall such a case some years ago in which a black person’s face could not be read by software built and calibrated for white skin:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM]

Henning introduces Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, who developed composite photography as a means of establishing social types based on physical features.  This was done through multiple exposure, the idea being that superimposing one image on top of another reveals similarities.


Objects of Desire
This section is less about photography and more a survey of psychological concepts related to desire, including objectification, fetishism, and voyeurism.  The main idea here is that objects of desire - and disgust - are socially constructed and subject to revision depending on the balance of power within any given society.  Henning’s discussion is entirely within a western context.

While objectification is singled out as a tool for controlling women’s bodies, it does not go unnoted that in itself, and regardless of subject matter, photography is a process of objectification.

Given the suspicious character of Freud’s theory of fetishism (rooted in the male child’s fear of castration), I found Henning’s overlong treatment somewhat surprising.  I would have thought it warranted only a sentence or two.  Equally odd is the theory propounded by Laura Mulvey, who finds the source of fetish in the male child’s first understanding of sexual difference.  Henning touches only briefly (as her brief is the body) on photography's role in fetishising consumer goods.

Henning sees anti-pornography campaigns as manifestations of changing mores regarding what kind of images are deemed socially acceptable.  Included here are notions of hard and soft pornography, aesthetic and explicit images, straight and gay types.  The only photographers mentioned in this section are Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, and only in passing in regards to the issue of censorship.

A 700 word case study of a single image of La Cicciolina aims to deploy the previously discussed ideas, but seems equally meandering and bereft of a major idea.


Technological Bodies
Henning explores the idea of the camera as a mechanical eye that provides information otherwise unattainable.  This goes back to body motion studies of the 19th century that slowed down movement and presented it in millisecond bits (resolving the long standing dispute over whether a running horse ever left the ground).  Later developments include x-ray, sonogram, and micro cameras.  It is now true that in medicine that the authority of the camera is often greater than the doctor.  One inadvertent side effect is that some of these imaging processing techniques have the potential to harm the body (such as overexposure to x-rays).

With the arrival of digital technologies, the emphasis has shifted from montage, the arrangement of disparate elements, to “the aesthetics of continuity.”  Photoshop and other software allows images to be blended seamlessly to create the appearance of wholeness.


Photography, Birth and Death
Starts with a nice quote from Sontag, “All photographs are memento mori.”  Followed by Barthe, who seems a bit less clear and see photos of corpses as “the living image of a dead thing.”  Henning glosses:  “in other words, the corpse appears to have been live at the moment of its encounter with the camera.”  I see no such thing in images of the dead.

The discussion then turns to the Victorian practice of memorializing the dead with photos of corpses, all dressed up in their Sunday finest and laid out to appear, in a Christian vision of death, to be resting peacefully.  Anthropologist Jay Ruby believes the practice continues to this day but no longer requires professionals and is done privately.  Today publicly displayed corpse photography is most often done by “artists” such as Serrano and Sue Fox (whose work I happened to run into earlier this week in a news item about an upcoming exhibit).  Photographers also work at the other end of life, capturing moments of birth, but Henning doesn’t describe a historical pedigree, suggesting perhaps this is a rather late development.

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