The Deviant Body in Photography

As the title of my post suggests, I found that the two readings for this week both suggested the (im)possibilities of the creation of images of the deviant body. In Crimp's discussion of Nicholas Nixon's images of persons with AIDS, we see a tension between representing the fact of AIDS and representing a fetishization of AIDS. Because of the socio-political dimensions of the AIDS crisis, images such as Nixon's or Solomon's inherently provoke discomfort from either those who recognize the failures of society to adequate respond to the crisis or those who see PWA themselves as failures of the socio-political system. As Crimp notes, though, most understandings of PWA focused on the deviance of those who with the disease. Gay male promiscuity and the issue of drug use among a racialized poor were seen as hallmarks of the discussion surrounding AIDS, and Crimp argues that images such as Nixon's and Solomon's had the potential to do harm in their fetishization of the physical effects of AIDS upon those who suffered from it - creating the gay male and the poor drug user as a 'physically deformed' other whose deviance was to examined from afar.

Similarly, Sekula discusses the influence of physiognomy and phrenology upon police photographs during the 19th century. Here, the importance of deviance is even more profound - in the work of someone like Bertillon, we see an attempt to archive the entirety of the deviant population - and an expectation that there is such a thing as the "average" deviant body. More interesting, I think, is Galton's work towards the creation of a composite "other." Of course, even without Galton's investment in eugenics these composite images would be troublingly racist, classist, etc. I found myself extremely uncomfortable when Sekula referenced Galton's attempt to create a composite image of a Jewish boy, especially after everything we discussed last week. In doing so, Galton collapses religious difference and physical deviance, something that would seem to support the Nazi attempts to rid their society of the 'deviant' Jewish citizens. I found Debierre's images of severed heads especially disturbing, as they recalled for me the clips from Night and Fog of severed body parts being piled together, being bulldozed. If one truly believes that deviance can be classified and typed, it seems that Sekula is pointing to the immense dangers of imposing such a position upon society by using the photographic medium to argue for the 'truth' of this deviance.