Photography in Context: The body as object of medical research

Articles via Athens

Medical illustrations have been made for thousands of years and mainly used as documentation, offering accurate records of the body, identifying patients’ condition and diseases, helping medical research, diagnosis and teaching.

Originally drawings, eventually photography has grown to be an important aid of medical recording.

On clinical images, the human body has been used as an object, controlled and placed into various positions. People, even when their face included, are anonymous, many illustrations are unisex. In most cases patients can not be identified. This is due to that only their body parts and innards shown or because of the range of imaging devices and technologies are used for the captures. This is not always a camera but x-ray, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, and other sophisticated machines. The development of new way of imaging techniques over the years has resulted in the ability to break down the human body into tissues, bones or even its smallest cells. Many times the body is not shown as a whole. People are often shown in their most vulnerable state, fighting diseases, opened up during surgery, unconscious or even dead.

Medical research and teaching need this level of objectivity and representation because it helps the understanding and the development of science and patient care.

Pituitary tumour as an enlarged mass
in the brain of a 48 year-old female patient

Source: Wellcome Images

X- ray, Barium meal

Source: Wellcome Images

The human body is a fascinating environment and many clinical photographers’ work cross the line of science and art. While keeping their educational values, with great artistry and sensitive representation, they come closer to documentary art.

Lennart Nilsson

www.lennartnilsson.com

Lennart Nilsson, pioneering medical photographer, was born in Sweden, in 1922. Nilsson started out as a photojournalist during the mid 1940s. During the 1950s, he began to experiment with new photographic techniques using microscopes. In 1965, his groundbreaking work, The Drama of Life Before Birth, was the cover story of Life magazine, introducing the public to unprecedented views of prenatal life, surprising in their clarity and immediacy. He followed his experiments with photography and light microscopy with his use of a scanning electron microscope.
Giant Steps 2008, RPS Journal, 148, 4, pp. 150-155, Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost, viewed 21 January 2012

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His book, A Child is Born, telling the story of conception to birth. Nilsson's photographs were arguably the most important images of the 20th century, shedding new light on human life. First published in 1965, A Child is Born has stayed in print ever since.

Smyth, D 2010, A Child is Born, British Journal Of Photography, 157, 7783, p. 18, Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost, viewed 21 January 2012

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Source: www.lennartnilsson.com

Participating in medical research and documentation of procedures also turned some non-clinical photographers to this exciting branch of photography.

Max Aguilera-Hellweg

http://maxaguilerahellweg.com

Max Aguilera-Hellweg spent some twenty years working as a photojournalist for Roiling Stone, The New York Times and Life. Then, one day in 1989, he was thrown violently by his horse and had to be operated. While convalescing, a magazine gave him an assignment, a series of photos of a surgeon at work. The experience was a revelation. Over the years that followed, Aguilera-Hellweg photographed some sixty surgical operations. In 1997, the results were published as The Sacred Heart. The photos are stunning. All were made following the same formal protocol: the operating theater is dark, with a beam of light revealing only the part of the body being operated on and the hands of the surgeon and his team. The powerful light seems to freeze the open flesh and blood, creating a baroque, Caravaggesque atmosphere. Some of the images are especially moving, such as the ones showing the separation of two newborn Siamese twins and the operation on a fetus with spin bifida. Each photo comes with a text describing the operation for the layman. The most compelling texts are the artist's own accounts of his experience. Some of his descriptions are even harder to take than the most brutally raw images, but there is always a huge respect for humanity.

Leydier, R, & Penwarden, C 2006, Max Aguilera-Hellweg, le coeur sacré / Opening the Sacred Heart /, Art-Press, 323, pp. 48-49, Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost, viewed 21 January 2012.

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Source: www.maxaugilerahellweg.com

Theodore Wan

Theodore Wan, medical photographer and artist’s intriguing series of medical photographs, completed in 1979. The large format, black and white photographs mimic the technical precision and visual codes of medical illustration, staging actual diagnostic or preparatory procedures associated with surgery, with the artist himself positioned as the patient. In addition to being medical illustrations these photographs also functioned as art – specifically, by Wan’s own account, as self-portraiture, and as a form of self investigation. Wan’s photographs are both art objects, a new kind of self-portraits, and teaching aids. His body is being constrained and manipulated into surgical positions, bombarded with x-rays and subjected to the judgment of others. The way he is feminising his body on some of his images is curious and raises the question of sexual orientation.

There are also a number of photographs of Wan alone, and with others, in front of a large grey and white minimalist grid that functioned a photographic backdrop. As such, it is functioned as a pointed reference to the Lamprey system of anthropometric photography for purposes of racial classification, but which also has medical applications.

Conley, C 2008, 'Theodore Wan and the Subject of Medical Illustration', RACAR: Revue D'art Canadienne/Canadian Art Review, 33, 1/2, pp. 14-27, Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost, viewed 21 January 2012.

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