notes - Photography (Steal The Soul)

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Section 8 – Photography – Steal The Soul

(1) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida – 1980

(2) Taken from my notes on Magenta Skies, a workshop run by Red Eye and the Association of Photographers – speakers were from Adobe/Pixl/British Journal of Photography/AOP/Visual Creators Index/MacUser/BIPP and RPS. It was a useful colour management workshop but a soft porn coffee table book – ever so tasteful but - yuck. The healing brush and liquidifyer are all part of Photoshop the former new to Photoshop 7! Go get your copy.

(3) Plasticistaion (Plastic People) is Professor Gunther von Hagens' method of preserving the human body as a anatomical exhibit - Body Worlds - has been in the UK in 2002 and has attracted vast numbers of visitors and had one exhibit distroyed:

	Tom Rosenthal : I am a 14 year-old and was at the exhibit today. As I am studying digestion, I found it very useful. But I was also present when that mad man took a hammer to one of your figures. It outraged me, but how does it make you feel? Professor Von Hagens : Well, I am deeply saddened by this act of sheer vandalism. No incident like this has ever happened before and 8 million people have visited Body Worlds exhibition. I am especially upset that it has happened here in the UK, a country I believe to be the first place of liberalism. I think this act is akin to desecration of cemeteries or graves. Those who chose to leave their bodies in this exhibition have a permanent place of enlightenment. This should be respected as much as those who choose the more traditional resting place of burial or cremation. http://www.channel4.com/community/showcards/A/Anatomists_-_Von_Hagens.html The Anatomists - Professor Gunther Von Hagens discussed his fascinating and controversial Body Worlds exhibition 26th March 2002

	These specimens are perfect embodiments of the inner profiles of blood vessels; the surrounding tissue has been removed to facilitate visibility. These vessels are first injected with dyed plastic. Once the plastic has hardened, it has already taken on the shape formed by the vessels; the surrounding soft tissue can then be mechanically and chemically removed (corroded) with the aid of ferments (collagenases, proteases). Sloughing and removal of remaining tissue is accomplished with ultrasound, a great deal of water, much patience and great care. In this way, arteries and their most minute clusters of blood vessels can be made visible.

This intricate network with its resonance of Promethean myth, lividly shows the innate connectivity of the body's infrastructure - we are electric.

(4) This is a adaptation of Anais Nin's poem in her short story Ragtime - the inspiration for doo-cot's very first touring performance/installation 'Discarded Memories'

(5) Well I could get Susan Sontag to say "To photograph people is to violate them...to photograph someone is sublimated murder...The act of taking photographs is a semblance of rape." But I don't - so instead I refer to Barthes and the use of the finger and not the phallus in photography - which makes me think of a slogan T-shirt I buy as a present for certain heterosexual men - 'No one knows I am a Lesbian'. Daddy is a murderer, rapist or lesbian?

(6) Virtual Anxiety - Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity, by Sarah Kember, 1998, Manchester University Press, ISBN 0 7190 4529 0, Page 11/12 - I use the quote as a signpost to the future - a form of Virtual Healer.

Below is a further quote (page 117) which contextualises many themes I have attempted to weave into this web.

	Intersubjectivity is a way of seeing from another’s standpoint as well as one’s own. It carries a transformative epistemology into the register of desire. Knowledge and desire, as Braidotti points out (and as discussed in chapter 4), are inextricably linked at the point of origin, and so what intersubjectivity does is describe a different way of knowing and relating to the original m/other (nature). This may also be said of other non-Oedipal theories of desire including perhaps Teresa De Lauretis’s theory of ‘perverse desire’, which rewrites fetishism in the context of lesbian sexuality, and presents it as a desire for the absent presence of the maternal body rather than for its disavowal by the phallus. In so far as lesbianism is the practice of desiring subjects who are female, De Lauretis also argues that lesbianism functions as a figuration within feminist theory (1994). In ‘Feminist Figuration and the Question of Origin’ (Kember 1996b) I argue that figurations are not only performative images of the future but transformative ways of reremembering the past. Figurations concerned with science and subjectivity also embody a relationship to nature and origin, and in this sense they are somewhat mythical. Figurations may be like myths in the sense that they are ideological (Barthes), epistemological (Lévi-Strauss) and psychological (Jung); but they are not like them in the sense of being naturalised, rationalised or universalised. They have a deep structure which is like the unthought known (chapter 1) but which is premised more on a technology of the self than on the concept of a true self. Figurations embody ways of being and thinking which are transgressive and transformative, and one of their tasks is to disrupt the teleological evolution of both humans and machines, nature and culture.