The Frame Tells Us What We Are Seeing

In a medical chart, and it becomes a symptom.

A photograph does not arrive alone. It comes with a caption, a location, a purpose, and an implied authority, signals that tell us whether we are looking at a patient, a victim, a model, an artwork, or an object. Change the presentation, and the meaning of the body changes with it. In a medical chart, the photograph becomes a symptom: something to be observed, categorized, compared, and interpreted.

Yet the history of medical photography has never been purely diagnostic. Images made by the Honolulu Board of Health during the Third Plague Pandemic in 1900, for example, did more than document visible signs of disease; they helped construct a visual understanding of the epidemic and its social ecology. Nearly a century later, photographs associated with the AIDS epidemic demonstrated how quickly an image could move beyond its original context and become medicalized, politicized, and embedded within larger narratives about illness, identity, and public fear. Historians of medical photography have increasingly emphasized this relationship between the camera and medicine: photography does not simply record medical knowledge, it can also shape the way that knowledge is produced and understood.

That relationship stretches back well before the invention of the camera. Renaissance physician-artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius used detailed illustrations to make the internal body visible, helping establish foundations for modern anatomical representation. When photography emerged in the 19th century, it transformed already highly visual fields such as dermatology and pathology by offering what appeared to be a more objective record of the bod. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1895 pushed that visibility beneath the skin, beginning an era in which medical images increasingly revealed structures inaccessible to ordinary sight. During th20th and 21st centuries, CT scans, MRI, ultrasound, PET, SPECT, microscopy, and other imaging technologies expanded that visual territory even further. Across each technological shift, the underlying promise remains similar: to make the otherwise unseen body legible. But the resulting image is never entirely neutral. The clinical setting, accompanying text, institutional authority, and reason the image was created all influence what we believe we are seeing, and what we believe the image means.

Melanie Pullen

In a police file, and it becomes evidence.

Place the photograph in a police file, and the body changes again. It is no longer primarily a patient to be diagnosed or an anatomical structure to be studied; it become evidence.

Photography entered the justice system remarkably early. An 1859 U.S. courtroom phogr4aph documented a forgery, an accident-scene photograph was recorded by 1875, and by 1879 an image of an injured person had been admitted as evidence. As photographic technology advanced, so did its forensic uses. Ballistic comparisons were being made through photography by `902, photographic speed-recording systems appeared in 1910, and fingerprint photographs entered the courtroom in 1911. Ultraviolet photography was approved for evidentiary use in the 1930s, while color photographs began appearing in courtrooms in the 1940s, although their admissibility continued to be contested for years. By 1991, courts were confronting another transformation when digitally enhanced fingerprint images were permitted in a Frye hearing. What began as a means of recording what could be seen gradually became a technology capable of revealing, comparing, enlarging, and even modifying visual information for legal interpretation.

Crime-scene photography developed alongside this increasing faith in the photograph as an objective witness. The Jack the Ripper investigations of 1888, for example, demonstrate an early and still primitive form of photographic scene documentation; later generations would transform such practices into increasingly standardized forensic workflows. Modern reference manuals and digital-forensics guidelines now prescribe how images should be captured, processed, preserved, and evaluated so that their evidentiary value can withstand scrutiny. Yet this history also exposes a tension similar to the one found in medical photography: a photograph may appear neutral while its meaning depends heavily on who made it, why it was made, what was included or excluded from the frage, and how it is presented afterward. In the courtroom, the photograph does not simply depict a wound, a body, an object, or a scene. Presented beneath the authority of an investigation, accompanied by testimony and placed into an evidentiary record, it becomes an argument about what happened.

The boundary between evidence and art becomes particularly visible in Melanie Pullen’s High Fashion Crime Scenes. Exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville in 2011, the series grew from Pullen’s study of historical crime-scene photographs held by the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. Rather than simply reproducing those photographs, Pullen reconstructed the scenes with models, elaborate sets, cinematic lighting, and contemporary haute couture. The result deliberately mimics the visual language of actual crime-scene photography while simultaneously resembling a fashion editorial. Pullen has described the work as an exploration of desensitization and the media’s tendency to sensationalize violence; MOCA similarly characterizes the series as a commentary on the glamorization of violent acts. Yet the photographs also create an uncomfortable contradiction: in criticizing the transformation of violence into spectacle, they themselves make scenes of death visually seductive. The viewer may initially notice the clothes, composition, color, or beauty of the model before registering the simulated corpse. That discomfort is part of what made the work provocative. An image that recalls something created to document a victim has been reconstructed, enlarged, beautifully lit, and placed on a museum wall. Evidence has become fashion, spectacle, and art, and our relationship to the body pictured within it changes accordingly.

Lejaren à Hiller

On a gallery wall, and it becomes art, but in an erotic publication it becomes sexual.

The nude has occupied an unstable position in photography almost since the medium’s beginning. It can function as an anatomical study, an exploration of form, a portrait, an erotic image, or fine art, and those categories have never been determined by nudity alone.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s historical survey of nude photography emphasizes the wide range of motivations and meanings that photographers have attached to the unclothed body. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Pictorialist photographers were deliberately arguing for photography’s status as fine art, using carefully staged compositions, romantic imagery, and techniques associated with painting. Within this context, the nude could be presented as an aesthetic study of line, light, shape, and the human form rather than primarily as a sexual object. The institution surrounding the photograph, the gallery, museum, artist’s portfolio, critical text, and even the language used to describe it, helps tell the viewer how the image is meant to be read.

But the photograph itself does not have to change for that interpretation to shift. Lejaren à Hiller’s Sutures in Ancient Surgery offers an unusually clear example. Beginning in 1927, Hiller created elaborate photographic tableaux depicting the history of surgery for the medical company Davis & Geck. The photographs were distributed to physicians and combined medical history, advertising, theatrical staging, and fine-art traditions; several included partially or completely nude female models. Thirteen of those images were later reproduced in a 1954 issue of Playboy. Removed from their medical and historical framework and inserted into a men’s magazine, the same photographs became susceptible to readings as pornography, pin-ups, or sexual entertainment. The history of physique photography provides another version of this ambiguity: the New York Public Library preserves male physique photographs from the 1950s and 1960s that circulated within a culture shaped by censorship as well as erotic consumption. Even photographs that predate their erotic publication can acquire a new identity through placement; Marilyn Monroe’s famous nude photographs, for example, were made in 1949 but published by Playboy in 1953 without her having posed for the magazine. The physical photograph may remain essentially the same, while the publication around it tells the viewer what kind of body they are supposedly seeing.

Edward Weston

Zoomed in or Beside a fabricated object, and suddenly its bodily reality becomes uncertain.

Photography can also disrupt the body’s meaning by removing the contextual information that allows us to recognize it in the first place.

Modernist photographers repeatedly used cropping, proximity, angle, light, and scale to transform recognizable anatomy into visual form. Charles Sheeler’s Nudes of 1918-19 were already described as semi-abstract photographs of the body. Edward Weston’s nudes pushed this transformation further: in a 1925 photograph, the isolated body becomes a symmetrical shape while remaining unmistakably physical, demonstrating what MoMA describes as Weston’s ability to discover abstraction within something entirely real. Bill Brandt later photographed body parts at extremely close range, placing enlarged and abstracted fragments of anatomy against the landscape of the East Sussex coast. Lee Friedlander continued this tradition in photographs made at such close range that torsos, hips, breasts, and limbs sometimes begin to resemble abstract sculpture. Across these works, the camera does not merely document a body. It can dismantle the visual information by which we recognize one.

The uncertainty becomes even more pronounced when the body is placed alongside objects. In her studio constructions, Michele Abeles combines ordinary objects, plants, fabrics, bottles, and other still-life materials, with nude male bodies that are frequently truncated by the photographic frame. MoMA describes the resulting images as renegotiating the relationship between still-life and nude photography. That collision is significant: once scale, framing, recognizable anatomy, and environmental clues become unreliable, the viewer has fewer tools for determining what belongs to the body and what belongs to the constructed scene. Flesh can begin to resemble landscape, sculpture, texture, or object; an object can begin to appear strangely anatomical. The distinction between the photographed body and the fabricated thing is no longer automatic. I am interested in what remains when those categories are stripped away, when the viewer cannot determine whether they are seeing a patient, a portrait, an abstraction, an object, or even a body.

Laurie Simmons

When the body is fabricated: dolls, mannequins, and the nude

The uncertainty between body and object can also move in the opposite direction. Photography does not only have the ability to make a human body appear abstract, sculptural, or unfamiliar; it can make an inanimate object begin to behave like a body. Artists have used dolls, mannequins, and other fabricated human forms to explore this ambiguity for nearly a century. In the 1930s, Hans Bellmer constructed life-sized, articulated female dolls that could be dismantled, rearranged, and photographed in increasingly distorted configurations. The Museum of Modern Art describes his photographs as probing the unstable relationship between the living figure and sculpture, while SFMOMA notes that his modular doll could be reassembled into contorted poses and occupy roles that shifted between victim and seductress. Here, the body is quite literally an object, built, separated into parts, repositioned, and photographed—but the resemblance to human anatomy makes it difficult to regard the resulting images as photographs of neutral sculpture. They remain bodily, sexual, and frequently disturbing precisely because the object so insistently refers back to flesh.

Laurie Simmons approaches this relationship from another direction. Since the 1970s, she has photographed dolls, figurines, mannequins, and miniature environments to question how images construct ideas about women, domesticity, identity, and representation. Her later The Love Doll series makes the uncertainty between object and person especially explicit. Simmons ordered a human-scale Japanese sex doll and photographed her performing everyday activities, reading, resting, walking outdoors, bathing, and inhabiting domestic spaces. In Day 29 (Nude with Dog), the doll appears completely unclothed. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis describes the photograph as confronting the viewer with the figure’s underlying status as an erotically charged object. Yet the surrounding series continually encourages the opposite response: to read this manufactured body as a woman with an interior life. The camera cannot make the doll human, but through scale, gesture, environment, and photographic convention, it can make the distinction between portraying a person and portraying an object temporarily less secure.

David Levinthal similarly uses photography to give small plastic figures a visual and psychological presence far beyond their physical scale. For more than four decades, he has constructed and photographed toys to revisit familiar cultural narratives, from cowboys and soldiers to Barbie dolls and other icons of American popular culture. His XXX series takes this practice directly into the territory of sexuality. The Kinsey Institute, which received sixty of the dolls used to make the series, describes the works as part of Levinthal’s examination of sexuality through photographed figurines. Here the idea of objectification becomes almost literal: bodies presented through the visual language of erotic photography are not people who have been reduced to objects, they are objects from the beginning. Yet once photographed, enlarged, isolated from their actual scale, and placed within the conventions of erotic imagery, the plastic figure can begin to occupy the visual role normally given to a human nude.

I have written about photographers such as Bellmer, Simmons, and Levinthal before through the lens of toy photography, and returning to them now makes me realize that the question I was interested in then has not disappeared, it has reversed. Toy photography can ask how convincingly an object can inhabit the role of a body. My current work asks how easily a body can begin to resemble an object. Photography places both possibilities onto the same flat visual surface. Flesh, plastic, clay, fabric, paint, and silicone all become arrangements of light, color, texture, shape, and shadow. Remove familiar cues of scale and anatomy, and the viewer may no longer be certain which material produced the form in front of the camera.

That uncertainty interests me more than the answer. A fabricated form does not have to become perfectly realistic, nor does a photographed body have to become completely abstract. The tension exists in the moment before recognition settles, when something appears anatomical but perhaps not human, artificial but strangely bodily, intimate without a clear source. In that space, the viewer begins supplying their own categories and assumptions. What do we recognize as sexual because it is inherently sexual, and what becomes sexual because we have been taught to read a particular shape, crop, texture, or presentation that way? At what point does an object become a body in our perception, and at what point can a body become simply form?

I am interested in what remains when those categories are stripped away, when the viewer cannot determine whether they are seeing a patient, a portrait, an abstraction, an object, or even a body.

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