A corps et à raison: Medical Photographs 1840-1920
40s movie star Merle Oberon was so vain that if she woke up with even one zit, she cancelled all social and professional engagements until the imperfection disappeared and her flawless complexion returned. She didn't want her beauty to disappoint.
The 18th century's evocation of the practical value of concentrated observation fostered the discovery and advancement of two disciplines: photography and medicine. By the middle of the 19th century, the newer science, photography, was put into the service of its ancient cousin. In the exhibition 'A Corps Et A Raison: Medical Photography from 1840-1920', one can't help noticing how these diagnostic documents are permeated with aesthetics; technicians, it seems, couldn't help being artful in spite of their subject matter.
Initially, it is the purely formal contradictions that fascinate: perfectly detailed mid-century specimens of chocolate-coloured or garishly hand-painted albumen prints of horrific but common sights. The boils, carbuncles, rashes and grotesque tumours that tormented the lives of more than a few are the stars in an exhibition that also includes pioneering microscopic photographs of the evil germs that caused all-but-vanished atrocities - syphilis, rabies, elephantiasis and so forth. Other images reveal the subject of the body beyond its surface. Several early examples of X-ray and autopsy photography attest to the roots of the poetic discourse of the body as an ever metamorphosing yet ultimately corrupt mechanism. How, we wonder, can these things appear to us as so strangely beautiful and yet so very unsettling? Were photographs like these - the conflation of the breathtakingly beautiful with the terrifying - part of the germ of Surrealism?
But after the fright and the pleasure of looking subsides, other realities set in, among them the public and private narratives chronicled in these images. Some of the stories, both bizarre and mundane, are described on the labels. Others are manufactured out of our personal experiences, historical knowledge and private fears: the dread that our own minor defects could be worse. The woman in portrait number 208, afflicted with a severe rash thought to be a symptom of secondary syphilis called Venus' necklace, was - evidently - misdiagnosed. Today this eruption is recognised as nothing more than the photosensitivity of some overused perfume product. The 'Passion' that came in a bottle was the one to abstain from. How, we wonder, did this absurd diagnosis contribute to the quality of her life? We ache to identify the particular humanness behind this and the other documents of disease, and are relieved that at least one of the identified technicians, photographer Félix Méheux, beheld the souls behind the festering sores.
Other topics of a more conceptual nature are brought to the surface: looking backward, historically, one recognises that selections in this exhibition were made to evoke the work of contemporary photographers and artists. Alec Fraser's 1890 head of a cadaver, vertically cut to expose the brain, signals a similar piece by the intensely popular Joel-Peter Witkin. Yet, Witkin's contemporary version seems even more superficial and depraved when considered alongside its antecedent. Conversely, an anonymous series of photographs from 1906 of a young girl afflicted with a severely disfiguring sarcoma in her jaw readies one for an imaginary confrontation with the difficult but intensely heartfelt work of Nancy Burson, whose photographs of congenitally disfigured children propose to change our rather dull and uncomplicated notions of ideal beauty.
All of this is presented as a kind of subtext for today's incurable sexually transmitted disease, AIDS, and how we confront it. Society's infantile panic at similar sights of immune deficiency affidavits is the Sphinxian riddle proposed. Are we, as individuals, able to confront this dilemma in all its manifestations or will we be like Merle Oberon and stay inside until it goes away?
