BODY: The Photography Book

For nearly 180 years, photography has had a profound impact on our understanding of the body. From medical images to advertising images to images used for artistic, scientific, documentary, political or pornographic purposes, photography touches on every area relating to the body and has a profound influence on our way of experiencing it. In this magnificent book, the first chapter Physique shows that life is first and foremost corporeal and that we are creatures of flesh and bone. Photography divides the body into organs and functions, their performance, failings and suffering, and now in the 21st century researchers can construct an atlas of the human being thanks in particular to new 3D imaging methods. The second chapter Alter Ego concerns the theatrical aspects of the body, our games, joys, impulses, emotions, all playing their part. Constructions situates the body within the consumer culture - eating, washing, shaving, exercising and the body fashions and image. Mutations describes the ideal of the high-performance body and techniques of physical, cognitive and emotional improvement. Celebration looks at the magnified, admired, dream body, often perceived through the bodies of women. The female nude is a silhouette with perfect curves, sometimes exaggerated, often retouched, always idolised. Male beauty is more heroic and muscular displaying virility and bravery and has recently become more sexualised, sometimes even feminised. Here photographers discover a joyful and untamed energy in the human natural body. Some images may be quite disturbing like Rat Poison Suicide where the flesh has been torn open to the square bottom lip of an African woman, the peculiar photographs of Cindy Sherman or the Mannequins series of 2003 by Valérie Berlin. Some nudity, some defective pages are possible in this remaindered stock of an otherwise absolutely fascinating tome. 360 colour and mono photos from the worlds of art, fashion, science and vernacular photography and including Araki, Bettina Rheims, Juergen Teller, and Wolfgang Tillmans among them. A really broad range of photography. 431pp, 21.8 x 30.7cm.
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