ABSTRACT
C H A P T E R 4 The subject as object Photography and the human body
M I C H E L L E H E N N I N G
191 Introduction The photographic body in crisis
196 Embodying social difference Photography and identification
201 Objects of desire and disgust Objectification, fetishism, voyeurism The celebrity body Pornography and sexual imagery Class and representations of the body
211 Technological bodies The camera as mechanical eye Interventions and scientific images The body as machine Digital imaging and the malleable body Case study: Materialism and embodiment
225 The body in transition Photography, birth and death
230 Summary
INTRODUCTION
The photographic body in cr is is It is hard to imagine photography without images of people: we dominate our own visual culture. Not all images of people are about the body, in the sense of constructing the body as a central concern, or reflecting on human physicality. In different periods and cultures, ways of understanding and imaging the human body differ: as this chapter will show, in times of war or in famines and epidemics, there are competing discourses of the human body (as vulnerable, ‘armoured’, contaminating for instance) and bodies are differen - tiated according to such ideas. New medical disciplines and technologies change the way in which the body is imagined. For example, since the eighteenth century, the principle discipline of the body was anatomy, which described bodies in terms of skeletal and muscular structure, organs and tissues. Yet now, fields such as endocrinology, immunology and genetics construe the body as an informational, communicative ensemble (van der Ploeg 2003: 64-66). This informational model of the body – the body as data – informs contemporary visual practices, in particular the collection of image-based biometrics such as fingerprints and iris-scans. In vernacular (amateur, everyday) photography, people regularly translate their own bodies into data by sharing digital images on online networks.
