15 Maud Lavin notes that'the Berlin Dadaists pridedthemselves on bothafiirming md negating theirprincipal themes. Whilethey were applauding the

newly rationalized man -associated in their mindswith the machine, theengineer, md the Sovietartist Vladimir Tadin -they were also satirizingman-a-machine idealism,puticuhly as it had beenplayed 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 toBertillon'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 inTexas. 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 Jerniganbut a body as object, isolated from its social and physical context and issensory 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 intothe 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 machineThe 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) whichcontributed 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. [n1920s 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 inthe 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), photomontageTIle 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 idealmels 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 fightrngmachine. The art historian Hal Foster shows how Hans Bellmer's Surrealistphotographs of dismembered and mutilated dolls, which can be read as deeplymisogynistic and paedophiliac, have different connotations in this historical6ontext. 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 oftwo or more originals, perhapsalso including written text, tomake a combined image.A montaged image may beimaginative, artistic, comic ordeliberately satirical.

limbs, are simultaneously a rebuke to the militaristic ambitions of Fascismand 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 andhuman torso recalls the avant-gard. .rr" of photornontage. However, avant-garde montage depended on the incongruous and vioLt juxtaposition ofbodies and machine parts. Here, the seamress brend of chair

"na ,orro suggesrs

a painless transition from human to technological. The ,eat ,ee.rrs torehuman 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 ofbeige, smooth as a mannequin. The head is missing but not severed; instead,the neck discreetly fades into shadow. Thus the adverrisemenr humanisestechnology, 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 partof the car itself.Joined at the hip, as it were.'The ad has the tark of picturingthe intermingling of body and machine without reminding us of the violentcollision of flesh and metal which happens in a car crash. To tread over thisline would undermine the ideorogy of th. hrr-r.ssness of tech.rology *hr.hit is promoting, and make the image disturbingly suggestive of d.aih.

Digital imaging and the malleable bodyThe Saab ad is a good exampre of digital compositing. As the new mediatheorist Lev Manovich says,

compositing in the 1990s supports a different aesthetic charactefizedby smoothness and continuity, Elements are now blended together, andboundaries erased rather than emphasised . . . where old meJia relied onmontage, new media substitutes the aesthetics of continuiry.

(Manovich 2007: 142)

More recently, advertising has gone further, manipulating human bodiesin illusionistic ways, to give flesh and skin a prasticiry b.yorra that of actualhuman flesh' A simple, and relatively restrained example can be found inadvertisements for the confectionary Toblerone, *hi.h show peoplet faceswith 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 andmirrors' However, the distortions produced using digitar i-"g. ri",'ipuJoosoftware (such as Adobe photoshop) are not opical but painterly, made foretouching the image. In this respect, they have more in common with drawnand 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 givean illusion of realistic motion. This was at its height in Disney animations ofthe 1920s and 1930s. The filmrnaker Sergei Eisenstein gave the ierm ,plasmatic,

to that elastic qualiry of animation that allows bodies in cartoons to metamorphinto 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 notingthe 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 thetechnological, and the potential displacement of the body by the machine. By presenting a seamless merging ofhuman and machine, this advedisement reassures us of the harmlessness of the car, and conceals the fact thattechnology can pierce and shatter bodies.

which, in the view of the theorists, the physical violence meted out on thepliabie cartoon bodies disciplined the audience and encouraged a submissisemasochism (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 thefluidity given by film special effects, mosr famously the liquid metal body ofthe 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; orin 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) mortaliryvulnerabiliry 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 immobilityand silence, its abiliry to freeze a past moment - are deathly qualities (Metz

1985: 83-4). Roland Barthes has argued that our horror at photographs ofcorpses 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 bodyphotographed is 'horrible' since it is given the same 'imrnortality'. Accordingto 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 inAmerican 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-mortemphotographs does not necessarily mean that theirs was a culture much more

SUSAN SONTAG (1979) OnPhotography,Harmondsworth: Penguin.

RoLAND BARTHES (1984)

Camera lucida, London:

Fontana.