15 Maud Lavin notes that

'the Berlin Dadaists prided

themselves on both
afiirming md negating their
principal themes. While
they were applauding the
newly rationalized man
-
associated in their minds
with the machine, the
engineer, md the Soviet
artist Vladimir Tadin
-
they were also satirizing
man-a-machine idealism,
puticuhly as it had been
played out in the carnage
of World Wu I' (Lavin
1993: 16).
PHOTOGRAPHY A CRlTICAL INTRODUCTION
anatomy
fXlaldby
2000). The images are used by companies and institu-
tions for research purposes and in the production of, for instance, crash test
dumrnies and prosthetic body parts. This prgect is similar in intention to
Bertillon's development of a police archiving system, only here the filing cards
are replaced by the electronic database. As with Bertillon, the project aims
to make bodies intelligible. In doing so, it represses the singularity of the
bodies used and the diversity of human bodies. The male body is presented
to us as 'complete' 'normal' and 'representative', yet it is also the body of a
39-year-old man called
Joseph Jernigan,
who was convicted of murder and
donated his body to science before being executed by lethal injection in
Texas. This is the cadaver of a criminal killed by the State, dissected and
turned into a representation by the Federal Government. The particular
history of this singular corpse points to the violence and policing involved
in the production of rational scientific knowledge via photography. The repre-
sentation which circulates as the Visible Fluman Male is not
Joseph Jernigan
but a body as object, isolated from its social and physical context and is
sensory entanglement with the world.
The Visible Human Project necessarily omits the ways in which the bodv
is already culturally inscribed, meaningful and historical, as it turns it into
the object of rationaT, scientific knowledge (Curtis 1999: 263). The project
shares something with the human genome proJect and with biometric secu-
rily systems, which have very different social aims, but also involve a
translation of physical bodies into information stored in a digital database.
The body as machine
The reduction of a human being to a 'data set' is a new development in an
historical tradition of thinking and representing the body in mecharfstic and
technological terms. Almost a century before the Visible Fluman Project, the
photographs and films of Marey and Gilbreth were among a large number
(including industrial, commercial, medical and art photographs) which
contributed to the perception of the human body as a machine. This perception
depended on a highly idealised and utopian concept ofthe efiicient, smooth-
running machine, which ignored the ways in which certain kinds of machines
mutilate bodies (for example, in factories and war). In popular culture, an
uneasy mixture of traditional ideas of femininity and the new image of the
disciplined, machine-like body informed the representation of women. [n
1920s Germany, women's magazines enthusiastically showed female aviators
and female celebrities beside their cars, while advertising photographs depicted
women as automaton-like mannequins (Lavin 1,993: 3, 59 and 732).
Avant-garde artists used new photographic techniques both to celebrate
technology and to critique it.1s The political stakes of this became clear in
the late 1930s, as Nazi ideology embraced a version of the machine body-
This combined ideas of classical perfection from ancient Greek art with the
racial classifications of nineteenth-century physiognomy, and Fordist,/Taylons
796
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE HUI\,4AN BODY
: :: .a -
... ...,:..., :.:..
.
:rl*&rr+i jtr.i* ::
!a ,
l-12 Hannah Hiich, Das schiine Miidclrcn (The Beautiful Girl), photomontage
TIle photomontages of the Dada artist Hannah Hoch celebrate the 'New Woman', playfully juxtaposinq
maqazine
ftmages of women with photographs of machine parts, but also seem critical of the uniform, idealised and
nrnadrine-like mannequins depicted in the same magazines.
ldeas of the ideally machine-like, efficient and uniform worker. The ideal
mels fedy was a self-contained, muscular, armoured machine. Some avant-
gerde photography challenged the image of the body as machine favoured
fo
Taylorism and the Nazi emphasis on the male body as a disciplined fightrng
machine. The art historian Hal Foster shows how Hans Bellmer's Surrealist
photographs of dismembered and mutilated dolls, which can be read as deeply
misogynistic and paedophiliac, have different connotations in this historical
6ontext. Bellmert photographs of distorted bodies, complete with prostheric
HAL FoSTER (1e93)
Compulsive Beauty,
Cambridge, MA, and london:
The l\4lT Press, chs 4 and 5.
'::iii:rirniri:,r: :iiri:r.r:1.!
r97
PHOIOGRAPHy:
A CRtTtCAt
TNTRODUCTTON
photomontage
The use of
two or more originals, perhaps
also including written text, to
make a combined image.
A montaged image may be
imaginative, artistic, comic or
deliberately satirical.
limbs, are simultaneously
a rebuke to the militaristic
ambitions
of Fascism
and Fascist ideas of bodily (and raciar) puriry
and a reminder
of the real muti-
lations produced
by technological
warfare (Foster
1993: 114_20).
-
The relationship
berween technology
and the body continues
to be ambiva-
lently and uneasily represented.
rn a 799g advertisement
for the Saab 9-3 car
(see Figure 4.r4), the photographic
/dtgital
montage blending
car seat and
human torso recalls the avant-gard.
.rr" of photornontage.
However,
avant-
garde
montage depended
on the incongruous
and vioLt juxtaposition
of
bodies and machine parts. Here, the seamress
brend of chair
"na
,orro suggesrs
a painless
transition from human to technological.
The ,eat ,ee.rrs tore
human than the torso, its headrest becomes
a kind ofhead,
and it has wrinkles,
while the torso has no hairs or irregurarities,
its flesh a polite
shade of
beige, smooth as a mannequin.
The head is missing but not severed; instead,
the neck discreetly fades into shadow. Thus the adverrisemenr
humanises
technology,
presenting
the merging
of technology
and the O"af ,, a.rl.Uf"
but also as inherently safe. The text confirms
this: 'you
actually feel like part
of the car itself.Joined
at the hip, as it were.'The
ad has the tark of picturing
the intermingling
of body and machine
without reminding
us of the violent
collision
of flesh and metal which happens in a car crash. To tread over this
line would undermine
the ideorogy
of th. hrr-r.ssness
of tech.rology
*hr.h
it is promoting,
and make the image disturbingly
suggestive
of d.aih.
Digital
imaging
and the malleable
body
The Saab ad is a good exampre of digital compositing.
As the new media
theorist Lev Manovich
says,
compositing
in the 1990s supports a different aesthetic
charactefized
by smoothness
and continuity, Elements
are now blended
together,
and
boundaries
erased rather than emphasised
. . . where old meJia relied on
montage,
new media substitutes
the aesthetics
of continuiry.
(Manovich
2007: 142)
More recently,
advertising has gone further, manipulating
human
bodies
in illusionistic
ways, to give flesh and skin a prasticiry
b.yorra that of actual
human
flesh' A simple, and relatively
restrained
example
can be found
in
advertisements
for the confectionary
Toblerone,
*hi.h show peoplet
faces
with one cheek implausibly
stretched
to reveal Tobleronei
.trademark,
triangular
shape. Distorted
bodies are not new to photography:
the photog-
raphers
Andr6 Kert6sz and Bin Brandt
are well tno*o for their opti.r$
distorted
nudes. In their work, the distortions
are achieved
using lenses and
mirrors'
However,
the distortions produced
using digitar i-"g. ri",'ipuJoo
software (such
as Adobe
photoshop)
are not opical but painterly,
made
fo
retouching
the image. In this respect,
they have more in common
with drawn
and painted
animated
cartoons
than the photographs
of Kert6sz and Brandt-
198
PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE HUMAN BODY
Animation uses techniques of distortion, including 'squash
and stretch, to give
an illusion of realistic motion. This was at its height in Disney animations of
the 1920s and 1930s. The filmrnaker Sergei Eisenstein gave the ierm
,plasmatic,
to that elastic qualiry of animation that allows bodies in cartoons to metamorph
into other bodies, objects to come alive. Eisenstein saw this in
(Jtopian
terms,
"'
expressing the potential of humans to change themselves and their world,
rejecting the idea of static form in favour of a return to 'primal protoplasm'
peslie
2002: 231-7) By the iate 1930s, though, other writers were noting
the loss of this playful shapeshifting in favour of more sanitised cartoons in
'1.13
Hans Bellmer, Hans Bellmer with fitst Doll, 1gi4
199
PHOTOGRAPHY A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
4.14 Advertisement for Saab, 1998 (original in colour)
One of the themes central t0 current representations of the body is the merging of the corporeal and the
technological, and the potential displacement of the body by the machine. By presenting a seamless merging of
human and machine, this advedisement reassures us of the harmlessness of the car, and conceals the fact that
technology can pierce and shatter bodies.
which, in the view of the theorists, the physical violence meted out on the
pliabie cartoon bodies disciplined the audience and encouraged a submissise
masochism (Leslte 2002: 171-7). This raises the interesting question of horr-
to read the digitally'morphed'bodies of contemporary cuiture. Digital manipu-
lation of photographs gives the body a photo-real malleabiliry relared to the
fluidity given by film special effects, mosr famously the liquid metal body of
the Tr1000 in the film Tbrminator 2 (dir.
James
Cameron, 1991). As with the
200
plasmatic character of animation, this can be understood in
(Jtopian
terms,
as enabling us to imagine a new and liberating cyborg, 'posthuman' body; or
in Dystopian terms, as part of the continued objectification of the human
body, in a culture where body parts are increasingly understood as comrnodities
(as in the trading of human organs for medical use).
PHOTOGRAPHY, BIRTH AND DEATH
Photography's particular abiliry to objectify the body associates it with death
-
this is expressed by Susan Sontag:
'All photographs are memento mori. To
take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortaliry
vulnerabiliry mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it,
all photographs testify to time's relentless melt' (Sontag 7979: 15).
The qualities which make a photograph work as a fetish
-
its immobility
and silence, its abiliry to freeze a past moment
-
are deathly qualities (Metz
1985: 83-4). Roland Barthes has argued that our horror at photographs of
corpses is related to our faith in photographic realism. Since, according to
Barthes, we tend to conflate the real and the live, a photograph of a corpse
seems to attest 'that the corpse is alive, as corpse'. it is the living image of a
dead thing'; in other words, the corpse appears to have been live at the
moment of its encounter with the camera (Barthes 1'984:78). Photography
renders the living immobile, frozen: the living person photographed may sub-
sequently die, but remains preserved in the photograph, while the dead body
photographed is 'horrible' since it is given the same
'imrnortality'.
According
to Barthes, photography'produces Death while trying to preserve life' (Barthes
7981/ 1984: 92;
Jay
1993: 450-6).
Current attitudes to post-mortem photography are related to the tendency
to accept photographs as reflections of the real as well as to contemporary
attitudes towards death (Rosler 1991). Everyday (as opposed to sensational or
exceptional) death is among those aspects openly represented in medieval
carnival but is increasingly relegated to the private realm in the modern era.
The practice ofphotographing dead relatives or friends was a publicly acceptable
practice until about 1880, with photographs of corpses displayed openly in
American homes, and professional photography studios advertising the services.
lt is usually assumed that the practice stopped, particular\ in English-speaking
countries. Anthropologist
Jay
Ruby has challenged this perception, showing
6at it continues in present-day America, but has come to be seen as shameful,
or highly private, and is seldom discussed, and the photographs are seldom
displayed publicly (Ruby 1995: 161). Originally, the significance of corpse
photography was to preserve a likeness. For many bereaved people, photographs
sill privately serve this function, but a new public unease has grown around
photographing the dead. Ruby suggests that the fact that nineteenth-century
photographers were frequently commissioned to produce post-mortem
photographs does not necessarily mean that theirs was a culture much more
SUSAN SONTAG
(1979) On
Photography,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
RoLAND BARTHES
(1984)
Camera lucida, London:
Fontana.