Collection Publications: Body Memory: Photographic Bodies

A "body memory" is an ingrained skill or sensation conferred by experience. As conventionally used, the term describes an acquired ability such as riding a bicycle. From a longer perspective, the human body itself, with its distinct collection of sensory organs and its native capacities for apprehending the world, is a species-wide "body memory" we all inherit at birth. Between these two forms of knowledge-the tricks learned by each body alone and those embodied in all of us-consider a third: the feeling of empathy that stirs inside when one perceives the bodies of others, whether directly or through the medium of representation. If our brains are ill equipped to imagine, in philosopher Thomas Nagel's example, what it is like to be a bat, neither is it easy to forget how it feels to be a person. Even in picture form, the sight of a falling body inspires different feelings than a falling stone. The exhibition Body Memory poses a dialogue between art made since the 1960s and photography of the past 150 years. The photographs address the body on many levels: works by artists hang alongside those of technicians, reporters, propagandists, archaeologists. These functional documents have more in common with contemporary art than one might expect. In its usefulness to all fields of knowledge and endeavor, and its consequent freedom from any one aesthetic program, photography has long been at home outside the museum or gallery. In recent decades artists have set out to achieve a comparable worldliness in their work. The photographs in Body Memory speak to critical issues in modern life and art. The photographed body, whether of the artist's model [see Eakins's Students at the Site for the Painting Swimming] or the cinema star, has gradually evolved standards for flawlessness beyond the reach of the living. In an ever-faster moving world, the body in absentia has become a familiar specter known by the traces it leaves behind, including photographs [see F√™te du Trone‚—Le Géant]. In the age of science and of spectacle, the body became an uncanny presence, at once familiar and foreign, an agent and an object [see Echondroma of the Scapula]. The camera has borne witness to bodies reaching critical mass in crowds [as in Woodrow Wilson: 21,000 Officers and Men, Champ Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio] and floating alone in the void [see Astronaut Bruce McCandless with Earth in Background].

Echondroma of the Scapula

In December 1863 noted Boston photographer James Wallace Black portrayed a thirty-one-pound tumor on the shoulder blade of a twenty-six-year-old Connecticut farmer. Absorbing "two-thirds of the clavicle and the upper six inches of the humerus," it was, a surgeon reported, "of almost bony hardness, of very irregular outline and firm attachment at the base." Presumably Black's image was of diagnostic use to physicians, but it goes far beyond clinical illustration. Expression and pose, though no more essential to the picture's purpose than its oval format, convey the farmer 's depthless dignity: even as his body was being logged as a specimen study, he was sitting for his portrait. __Woodrow Wilson: 21,000 Officers and Men, Champ Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio__ During World War I, Chicago-based photographers Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas traveled to armed service training camps to make mass novelty portraits. About a week before each shoot, they affixed their view camera to a high tower platform. An image (here, President Woodrow Wilson's profile) was first diagrammed on the camera's ground glass, then laid out in rope on the marching ground below. This photograph features 21,000 men dressed in bright or dark uniform as dictated by the composition-- a lasting tribute to military discipline and the pixel-- like possibilities of mass mobilization. __Astronaut Bruce McCandless with Earth in Background__ The first untethered space walks occurred in 1984. Equipped with a nitrogen jet -propelled, joystick-driven backpack, shuttle mission specialist Bruce McCandless soared as far as 320 feet from the orbiting Challenger. NASA's term for this mode of locomotion-"free flying"-aptly invokes a tension between dreamlike liberty and terrifying free fall. The images recording McCandless's flight are among the most sublime, and vertigo- inducing, in photography's history.