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anatomy fXlaldby 2000). The images are used by companies and institutions for research purposes and in the production of, for instance, crash test dumrnies and prosthetic body parts. This prgect is similar in intention to Bertillon'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 in Texas. 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 representation which circulates as the Visible Fluman Male is not Joseph Jernigan but a body as object, isolated from its social and physical context and is sensory 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 into the object of rationaT, scientific knowledge (Curtis 1999: 263). The project shares something with the human genome proJect and with biometric securily 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 machine The 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 . 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) which

15 Maud Lavin notes that 'the Berlin Dadaists prided themselves on both afiirming md negating their principal themes. While they were applauding the newly rationalized man associated in their minds with the machine, the engineer, md the Soviet artist Vladimir Tadin they were also satirizing man-a-machine idealism, puticuhly as it had been played out in the carnage of World Wu I' (Lavin

1993: 16).

contributed to the perception of the human body as a machine. This perception depended on a highly idealised and utopian concept ofthe efiicient, smoothrunning 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. [n 1920s , 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 in the late 1930s, as Nazi ideology embraced a version of the machine bodyThis combined ideas of classical perfection from ancient Greek art with the racial classifications of nineteenth-century physiognomy, and Fordist,/Taylons

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TIle 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 ideal mels fedy was a self-contained, muscular, armoured machine. Some avantgerde photography challenged the image of the body as machine favoured fo Taylorism and the Nazi emphasis on the male body as a disciplined fightrng machine. The art historian Hal Foster shows how Hans Bellmer's Surrealist photographs of dismembered and mutilated dolls, which can be read as deeply misogynistic and paedophiliac, have different connotations in this historical 6ontext. Bellmert photographs of distorted bodies, complete with prostheric

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HAL FoSTER (1e93)

Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, MA, and london: The l\4lT Press, chs 4 and 5.

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limbs, are simultaneously a rebuke to the militaristic ambitions of Fascism and 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 ment for the

9-3 car seat and human torso recalls the avant-gard. .rr" of photornontage. However, avant(see Figure

photomontage The use of two or more originals, perhaps also including written text, to make a combined image. A montaged image may be imaginative, artistic, comic or deliberately satirical.

Saab

4.r4), the photographic /dtgital montage blending car

garde montage depended on the incongruous and vioLt juxtaposition of bodies and machine parts. Here, the seamress brend of chair ,orro suggesrs a painless transition from human to technological. The "na ,eat ,ee.rrs tore human 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 of beige, smooth as a mannequin. The head is missing but not severed; instead, the neck discreetly fades into shadow. Thus the adverrisemenr humanises technology, 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 part of the car itself.ed at the hip, as it were.'The ad has the tark of picturing the intermingling of body and machine without reminding us of the violent collision of flesh and metal which happens in a car crash. To tread over this line would undermine the ideorogy of th. hrr-r.ssness of tech.rology *hr.h it is promoting, and make the image disturbingly suggestive of d.aih.

Digital imaging and the malleable body

The Saab ad is a good exampre of digital compositing. As the new media theorist Lev Manovich says, compositing in the 1990s s a different aesthetic charactefized

by smoothness and continuity, Elements are now blended together, and boundaries erased rather than emphasised . . . where old meJia relied on montage, new media substitutes the aesthetics of continuiry. (Manovich 2007: 142)

More recently, advertising has gone further, manipulating human bodies ways, to give flesh and skin a prasticiry b.yorra that of actual human flesh' A simple, and relatively restrained example can be found in ments for the confectionary Toblerone, *hi.h show peoplet faces with one cheek implausibly stretched to reveal Tobleronei .trademark, triangular shape. Distorted bodies are not new to photography: the photographers Andr6 Kert6sz and Bin Brandt are well tno*o for their opti.r$ distorted nudes. In their work, the distortions are achieved using lenses and

in illusionistic

mirrors' However, the distortions produced using digitar i-"g. ri",'ipuJoo software (such as Adobe photoshop) are not opical but painterly,

made fo retouching the image. In this respect, they have more in common with drawn and painted animated cartoons than the photographs of Kert6sz and Brandt-

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Animation uses techniques of distortion, including 'squash and stretch, to give an illusion of realistic motion. This was at its height in Disney animations of

the 1920s and 1930s. The filmrnaker Sergei Eisenstein gave the ierm ,plasmatic, to that elastic qualiry of animation that allows bodies in cartoons to metamorph into other bodies, objects to come alive. Eisenstein saw this in (Jtopian , 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 noting the loss of this playful shapeshifting in favour of more sanitised cartoons in

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4.14 ment for Saab, 1998 (original in colour) One of the themes central t0 current representations of the body is the merging of the corporeal and the technological, and the potential displacement of the body by the machine. By presenting a seamless merging of human and machine, this advedisement reassures us of the harmlessness of the car, and conceals the fact that technology can pierce and shatter bodies.

which, in the view of the theorists, the physical violence meted out on the pliabie cartoon bodies disciplined the audience and encouraged a submissise masochism (Leslte 2002: 171-7). This raises the interesting question of horrto read the digitally'morphed'bodies of contemporary cuiture. Digital manipulation of photographs gives the body a photo-real malleabiliry relared to the fluidity given by film special effects, mosr famously the liquid metal body of the Tr1000 in the film Tbrminator 2 (dir. James Cameron, 1991). As with the

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plasmatic character of animation, this can be understood in (Jtopian , as enabling us to imagine a new and liberating cyborg, 'posthuman' body; or in Dystopian , 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) mortaliry vulnerabiliry 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 immobility and silence, its abiliry to freeze a past moment - are deathly qualities (Metz 1985: 83-4). Roland Barthes has argued that our horror at photographs of corpses 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 subsequently die, but remains preserved in the photograph, while the dead body photographed is 'horrible' since it is given the same 'imrnortality'. According to 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 in American 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-mortem photographs does not necessarily mean that theirs was a culture much more

SUSAN SONTAG (1979)

On

Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

RoLAND BARTHES (1984) Camera lucida, London: Fontana.