ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is, of course, a modification of the celebrated Biblical phrase, ‘Behold the man’ or Ecce Homo. This phrase marks a key moment in the public life of Jesus Christ and, as will be seen later, has come to be much used as the title of exhibitions representing the male body (as well as of Nietzsche’s celebrated autobiographico-philosophical work of 1888, which is tellingly subtitled ‘How one becomes what one is’). In this chapter, I take this culturally resonant phrase as a starting-point for the examination of some photographic representations of illness in men which seem to me to interrogate in interesting ways the nature both of masculinity and of mortality.
