Flesh and Dream: Anatomy of Surrealism

A few days ago I was invited to speak at the Rome Tatttoo Museum for Creative Mornings, a cultural event held every month around the world; it is a free and informal breakfast combined with a conference on a set theme, the same for all 196 cities in which the initiative takes place. January’s theme was SURREAL, and I therefore decided to talk about the relationship between anatomy and surrealism. Here is the revised transcription of my speech.

Brussels, 1932.
Near the railway station the annual Foire du Midi is held, gahtering in the capital all the traveling carnivals that tour Belgium.


Our protagonist is this man, just over thirty years old, who’s wandering around the fair and looking at the various attractions until his gaze is captured by a poster advertising Dr. Spitzner’s anatomical museum.

Dr. Spitzner is not even a real doctor, rather an anatomist who tried to set up a museum in Paris; he did not succeed, and started traveling with the carnival. His collection, behind a pedagogical façade (the museum is supposed to inform the public about the risks related to venereal diseases or alcohol abuse), is designed above all to arouse the audience’s mobrid curiosity and voyeurism.


The first thing that attracts the attention of our man is a beautiful wax sculpture of a sleeping woman: a mechanism makes her raise and lower her chest, as if she were breathing. The man pays the ticket and enters the sideshow. But past the red velvet curtains, a vision of wonder and horror appears before his eyes. Pathological waxes show the ravages of syphilis, monstrous bodies like those of the Tocci siamese twins are represented along scenes of surgical operations. Women appear to be operated by “phantom” hands, without arms or bodies. The same sleeping Venus seen at the entrance is dismantled under the eyes of the public, organ after organ, in a sort of spectacular dissection.

The man is upset, and the vision of the Spitzner museum will forever change his life.
In fact, our protagonist is called Paul Delvaux, a painter who until then has only painted post-impressionist (yet quite unimpressive!) bucolic landscapes.

After his visit to the Spitzner museum, however, his art will take a completely different path.
His paintings will turn into dreamlike visions, in which almost all the elements seem to refer to that original trauma or, better, to that original epiphany. The strange non-places which the figures inhabit seem to be suspended halfway between De Chirico‘s metaphysical landscapes and the fake neoclassical sceneries used in fairgrounds; his paintings are populated with sleeping venuses and female nudes, showing a cold and hieratic eroticism, and dozens of skeletons; the train station will become another of Delvaux’s obsessions.

Regarding that experience Delvaux will declare, many years later:

That disturbing, even a little morbid atmosphere, the unusual exhibition of anatomical waxes in a place meant for  joy, noise, lights, joviality […] All this has left deep traces in my life for a very long time. The discovery of the Spitzner museum made me veer completely in my conception of painting.

(cited in H. Palouzié e C. Ducourau, De la collection Fontana à la collection Spitzner, In Situ [En ligne], n.31, 2017)

But why was Delvaux so touched by the vision of the inside of the human body?
In Bananas (1971), Woody Allen wakes up after taking a blow on the head, and upon touching the wound he looks at his fingers and exclaims: “Blood! That should be on inside”. I believe this to bethe most concise definition of anatomy as a Freudian repression/denial.


What is inside the body should remain off-scene (obscene). We should never see it, because otherwise it would mean that something went wrong. The inside of our body is a misunderstood territory and a real taboo – we will later attempt to see why.
So of course, there is a certain fascination for the obscene, especially for a man like Delvaux who came from a rigid and puritan family; a mixture of erotic impulses and death.


But there’s more: those waxes have a quality that goes beyond reality. What Delvaux experienced is the surrealism of anatomy.
In fact, whenever we enter an anatomical museum, we’re accessing a totally alien, unsettling, absurd dimension.

It is therefore not surprising that the Surrealists, to whom Delvaux was close, exploited anatomy to destabilize their audience: surrealists were constantly searching for this type of elements, and experiences, which could free the unconscious.
Surrealism also had a fascination for death, right from its very beginnings. One example is the Poisson soluble, Breton‘s syllogy which accompanied the Manifesto (the idea of a “soluble fish” can make us smile, but is in truth desperately dramatic), another is the famous creative game of the “exquisite corpse“.
The Surrealist Manifesto stated it very clearly: “Surrealism will introduce you to Death, which is a secret society”.

So Max Ernst in his collage wroks for Une semaine de bonté often used scraps of anatomical illustrations; Roland Topor cut and peeled his characters with Sadeian cruelty, hinting at the menacing monsters of the unconscious lurking under our skin; Réné Magritte covered his two lovers’ faces with a cloth, as if they were already corpses on the autopsy table, thus giving the couple a funereal aspect.

But Hans Bellmer above all put anatomy at the core of his lucid expressive universe, first with his series of photos of his handcrafted ball-joint dolls, with which he reinvented the female body; and later in his etchings, where the various anatomical details merge and blur into new configurations of flesh and dream. All of Bellmer’s art is obsessively and fetishly aimed at discovering the algorithm that makes the female body so seductive (the “algebra of desire”, according to its own definition).

In the series of lithographs entitled Rose ouverte la nuit, in which a girl lifts the skin of her abdomen to unveil her internal organs, Bellmer is directly referring to the iconography of terracotta/wax anatomical models, and to ancient medical illustrations.

This idea that the human body is a territory to explore and map, is directly derived from the dawn of the anatomical discipline. The first one who cut this secret space open for study purposes, at least in a truly programmatic way, was Vesalius. I have often written about him, and to understand the extent of his revolution you might want to check out this article.

Yet even after Vesalio the feelings of guilt attached to the act of dissection did not diminish – opening a human body was still seen as a desecration.
According to various scholars, this sense of guilt is behind the “vivification” of the écorchés, the flayed cadavers represented in anatomical plates, which were shown in plastic poses as if they were alive and perfectly well – an iconography partly borrowed from that of the Catholic saints, always eager to exhibit the mutilations they suffered during martyrdom.

In the anatomical plates of the 17th and 18th centuries, this tendency becomes so visionary as to become involuntarily fantasy-like (see R. Caillois, Au cœur du fantastique, 1965).
A striking example is the following illustration (from the Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano by Valverde, 1556) showing a dissected cadaver which in turn is dissecting another one: surrealism ante litteram, and a quite extraordinary macabre fantasy.

At the time scholars were quite aware of the aesthetic problem: two of the greatest anatomists of the late 17th century, Govert Bidloo and Frederik Ruysch, became bitter enemies precisely because they disagreed on which kind of aesthetics was more suitable for the anatomical discipline.


Bidloo, in his treatises, had ordered the illustrations to be as realistic as possible. Dissection was shown in a very graphic way, with depictions of tied bodies and fixing pins. This was no idealized view at all, as realism was pushed to the extreme in a plate which even included a fly landing on the corpse.

On the other hand, Ruysch’s sensibility was typical of wunderkammern, and as he embellished his animal preparations with compositions of shells and corals, he did so also with human preparations, to make them more pleasing to the eye.

His anatomical preparations were artistic, sometimes openly allegorical; his now-lost dioramas were quite famous in this regard, as they were made entirely from organic materials (kidney stones used as rocks, arteries and dried veins as trees, fetal skeletons drying their tears on handkerchiefs made from meninges, etc.).

Often the preserved parts were embellished with laces and embroidery made by Ruysch’s daughter Rachel, who from an early age helped her father in his dissections (she can be seen standing on the right with a skeleton in her hand in Van Neck‘s Anatomy Lesson by Dr. Frederik Ruysch).

We could say that Ruysch was both an anatomist and a showman (therefore, a forerunner of that Dr. Spitzner whose museum so impressed Delvaux), who exploited his own art in a spectacular way in order to gain success in European courts. And in a sense he won his dispute with Bidloo, because the surreal quality of anatomical illustrations remained almost unchallenged until the advent of positivism.

Going back to the 1900s, however, things start to radically change from the middle of the century. Two global conflicts have undermined trust in mankind and in history; traditional society begins breaking down, technology enters the people’s homes and work becomes more and more mechanized. Thus a sense of loss of idenity, which also involves the body, begins to emerge.


If in the 1930s Fritz Kahn (above) could still look at anatomy with an engineering gaze, as if it were a perfect machine, in the second half of the century everything was wavering. The body becomes mutant, indefinite, fluid,  as is the case in Xia Xiaowan‘s glass paintings, which change depending on the perspective, making the subject’s anatomy uncertain.

Starting from the 60s and the 70s, the search for identity implies a reappropriation of the body as a canvas on which to express one’s own individuality: it is the advent of body art and of the customization of the body (plastic surgery, tattoos, piercing).
The body becomes victim of hybridizations between the organic and the mechanical, oscillating between dystopian visions of flesh and metal fused together – as in Tetsuo or Cronenberg’s films – and cyberpunk prophecies, up to the tragic dehumanization of a fully mechanized society depicted by Tetsuya Ishida.

In spite of millenarians, however, the world does not end in the year 2000 nor in the much feared year 2012. Society continues to change, and hybridization is a concept that has entered the collective unconscious; an artist like Nunzio Paci can now use it in a non-dystopian perspective, guided by ecological concerns. He is able to intersect human anatomy with the animal and plant kingdom in order to demonstrate our intimate communion and continuity with nature; just like Kate McDowell does in her ceramics works.

The anatomical and scientific imagery becomes disturbing, on the other hand, in the paintings of Spanish artist Dino Valls, whose characters appear to be victims of esoteric experiments, continually subjected to invasive examinations, while their tear-stained eyes suggest a tragic, ancestral and repeated dimension.

Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin used the body – both the imperfect and different body, and the anatomized body, literally cut into pieces – to represent the beauty of the soul in an aesthetic way. A Catholic fervent, Witkin is truly convinced that “everything is illuminated”, and his research has a mystical quality. Looking for the divine even in what scares us or horrifies us, his aim is to expose our substantial identity with God. This might be the meaning of one of his most controversial works, The Kiss, in which the two halves of a severed head are positioned as if kissing each other: love is to recognize the divine in the other, and every kiss is nothing but God loving himself. (Here you can find my interview with Witkin – Italian only.)

Valerio Carrubba‘s works are more strictly surrealistic, and particularly interesting because they bring the pictorial medium closer to its anatomical content: the artist creates different versions of the same picture one above the other, adding layers of paint as if they were epidermal layers, only the last of which remains visible.

Anatomy’s still-subversive power is testified by its widespread use within the current of pop surrealism, often creating a contrast between childish and lacquered images and the anatomical unveiling.

Also our friend Stefano Bessoni makes frequent reference to anatomy, in particular in one of his latest works which is dedicated to the figure of Rachel, the aforementioned daughter of Ruysch.

Much in the same satirical and rebellious vein is the work of graffiti artist Nychos, who anatomizes, cuts into pieces and exposes the entrails of some of the most sacred icons of popular culture.
Jessica Harrison reserves a similar treatment to granma’s china, and Fernando Vicente uses the idea of vanitas to spoof the sensual imagery of pin-up models.

And the woman’s body, the most subject to aesthetic imperatives and social pressures, is the focus of Sally Hewett‘s work, revolving around those anatomical details that are usually considered unsightly – surgical scars, cellulite, stretch marks – in order to reaffirm the beauty of imperfection.

Autopsy, the act of “looking with one’s own eyes”, is the first step in empirical knowledge.
But looking at one’s own body involves a painful and difficult awareness: it also means acknowledging its mortality. In fact, the famous maxim inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, “Know thyself“, was essentially a memento mori (as evidenced by the mosaic from the Convent of San Gregorio on the Appian Way). It meant “know who you are, understand your limits, remember your finitude”.

This is perhaps the reason why blood “should be on the inside”, and why our inner landscape of organs, adipose masses and vascularized tissues still seems so unfamiliar, so disgusting, so surreal. We do not want to think about it because it reminds us of our unfortunate reality of limited, mortal animals.

But our very identity can not exist without this body, though fleeting and fallible; and our denial of anatomy, in turn, is exactly the reason why artists will continue to explore its imagery.
Because the best art is subversive, one that – as in Banksy’s famous definition – should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfotable.

Bobby Yeah

Robert Morgan, classe 1974, è nato e cresciuto a Yateley, città – a quanto dice lui – infestata dai fantasmi. Oggi vive a Londra, ma le cose non sono molto cambiate: ora è il suo appartamento ad essere abitato dagli spettri.
A parte questi disagi, cui bisogna rassegnarsi se si risiede nel Regno Unito, Morgan è un filmmaker multipremiato e apprezzato da pubblico e critica. I suoi lavori sono cupi e inquietanti, spesso velatamente autobiografici: il suo Monsters (2004), ad esempio, nasce dai ricordi d’infanzia di Robert quando con la famiglia si trasferì nei pressi di un manicomio.

Ma è con Bobby Yeah (2011) che Morgan si fa conoscere a livello internazionale. Questo cortometraggio viene nominato ai prestigiosi BAFTA, proiettato al Sundance e riceve premi un po’ ovunque. Si tratta di un film d’animazione a tecnica mista – ma più di questo non possiamo dirvi. Quello che accade in Bobby Yeah dovrete scoprirlo da soli, anche perché difficilmente troveremmo le parole adeguate per descrivere questo piccolo, folle gioiello. Quando pensate che la fantasia disturbata dell’autore abbia raggiunto il suo culmine, e che nulla di più oltraggiosamente osceno possa succedere, regolarmente succede.

La pagina Wiki su Robert Morgan cita, fra gli artisti che l’hanno influenzato, Bacon, Poe, Lynch, Cronenberg, Witkin e Bellmer. Certo, in trasparenza si intravede tutto questo; eppure probabilmente nessuno di questi signori ha mai partorito qualcosa di altrettanto weird e malato. Ecco il trailer di Bobby Yeah.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaS_S5Gt7L0]

[AGGIORNAMENTO] Il cortometraggio non è più disponibile in versione integrale su YouTube. E’ visionabile on-demand sul sito ufficiale di Robert Morgan, al prezzo di un dollaro.

(Grazie, Paolo!)

Special: Photographing Death – III

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Joel-Peter Witkin is considered one of the greatest and most original living photographers, who has risen over the years to become a true legend of modern photography. He was born in Brooklyn in 1939, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, who separated because of the irreconcilability of their religious positions. From a young age, therefore, Witkin knew the profound influence of the dilemmas of faith. As he repeatedly recounted, another pivotal episode was witnessing a car accident as a child going to mass one day with his mother and brother; in the confusion of sheet metal and shouting, little Joel suddenly found himself alone and saw something rolling toward him. It was the head of a young girl. Joel bent down to caress her face, talk to her and soothe her, but before he could reach out a hand, someone took him away. This seminal anecdote already contains some of what would become true thematic obsessions for Witkin: spirit, compassion for suffering, and the search for purity through overcoming what frightens us.

After graduating with a degree in the arts, and beginning his career as a war photographer in Vietnam, in 1982 Witkin obtained permission to take some photographs of anatomical preparations, and was loaned a longitudinally dissected human head for 24 hours. Witkin decides to place the twin halves in the act of kissing: the effect is destabilizing and moving, as if the moment of death were an extreme reconciliation with the self, a recognition of one’s divine part and finally loving it without reservation.

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The Kiss is the shot that makes the photographer suddenly famous, for better or worse: while some critics immediately understand the powerful emotional charge of the photograph, many cry scandal, and the University itself, upon discovering his use of the preparation, decides that Witkin is persona non grata. He therefore moves to New Mexico, where he can at any time cross the border and thus circumvent the stringent American laws on the use of corpses. From that moment on, Witkin’s work focuses precisely on death, and on the “different.”

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Working with corpses or body parts, with models who are transsexual, mutilated, dwarfed, or suffering from various deformities, Witkin creates baroque compositions with a clear pictorial matrix (prepared with maniacal precision from sketches and sketches), often reinterpreting great works by Renaissance masters or important religious episodes.

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Witkin Archive Shot rigorously in the studio, where every minute detail can be controlled at the artist’s leisure, the photographs are then further worked on in the development stage, in which Witkin intervenes by scratching the surface of the photos, drawing on them, ruining them with acids, cutting and reworking them according to a variety of techniques to achieve his unmistakable “antiqued” black and white in the manner of an old daguerreotype.

Despite the rough and extreme subjects, Witkin’s gaze is always compassionate and “in love” with the sacredness of life. Even the confidence that his subjects accord him, in being photographed, is precisely to be attributed to the sincerity with which he searches for signs of the divine even in the unfortunate or different physiques: Witkin has the rare gift of bringing out an almost supernatural sensuality and purity from the strangest and most twisted bodies, capturing the light that seems to emanate precisely from the suffering they have experienced. What is even more extraordinary, he does not need the body to be alive to see, and photograph, its blinding beauty.

Here are our five questions to Joel-Peter Witkin.

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1. Why did you decide it was important for you to depict death in your photographic work?

Death is a part of everyone’s life. Death is also the great divider of human belief to secular’s — it is the timeless nod, to the religious, it is eternal life with God.

Witkin Archive

2. What would you say is the purpose, if any, of your post-mortem photography work? Are you just photographing the bodies, or do you seek something more?

To photograph death and human remains is “holy work”.  What and whom I photograph is truly ourselves. I see beauty in the specimens I photograph.

joel-peter-witkin-1996 3. As with all things that challenge our denial of death, the macabre and unsettling tone of your pictures could be regarded by some as obscene and disrespectful. Were you interested in a particular shock value, and how do you feel towards the taboo nature of your subject?

The great paintings and sculpture of the past have always dealt with death. I like to say that “Death is like lunch—it’s coming!”. Before, people were born and died in their homes. Now we are born and die in institutions. We wear numbers on our wrists. We die alone.
So, of course, people now are shocked at seeing, in a sense, themselves. I believe nothing should be taboo. In fact when I am privileged to photograph death, I am usually very touched by the spirit still present in people.

Witkin Archive

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4. Was it difficult to approach the corpses, on a personal level? Are there any particular and interesting anecdotes regarding the circumstances of some of your photographs?

When I photographed Man Without a Head  (a dead man sitting in a chair at a morgue whose head had been removed for research), he was wearing black socks. That made it a little more personal. The doctor, his assistant and I lifted this dead man from the dissecting table and placed the body on the steel chair. I had to work with the dead man, in that I had to balance his arms so that he didn’t fall onto the floor. The floor in the photograph was covered with the blood that streamed out of his neck where the head had been removed  I was grateful to him for working with me.

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5. Would you like a post-mortem picture be taken of you after you die? How would you like to imagine that photo?

I have already made arrangements to have my organs removed after my death in order to help the living. Whatever remains will be buried at a military cemetery since I am an army veteran. Therefore, I will miss the opportunity you have asked about!

P.S. [Referencing this blog’s motto] I don’t want to “keep the world weird” —I want to make it more loving!

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La biblioteca delle meraviglie – V

Alberto Zanchetta

FRENOLOGIA DELLA VANITAS – Il teschio nelle arti visive

(2011, Johan & Levi)

Vita, miracoli e morte del teschio. Lo splendido volume di Alberto Zanchetta racconta la storia di una trasformazione. Attraverso un unico elemento simbolico, l’effigie del teschio nella storia dell’arte, e seguendone le mutazioni di senso e di significato nel corso dei secoli, ci parla di come la nostra stessa sensibilità abbia cambiato forma con il passare del tempo. Da icona funebre a dettaglio centrale delle vanitas, fino alla moderna ubiquità che ne fa vacua decorazione e ne appiattisce ogni forza oscena, il teschio ha accompagnato dalla preistoria fino ad oggi la nostra cultura: vero e proprio specchio, le cui orbite vuote fissano l’osservatore spingendolo a meditare sull’inesorabilità del tempo e sulla morte. Come si sono serviti gli artisti di questo prodigioso elemento iconografico? Quando e perché è cambiato il suo utilizzo dal Medioevo ad oggi? C’è il rischio che l’attuale proliferare indiscriminato dei teschi, dalla moda, ai tatuaggi, ai graffiti, possa renderli “innocui” e alla lunga privarci di un simbolo forte e antico quanto l’uomo? L’autore ripercorre questa particolare storia esaminando e approfondendo di volta in volta tematiche e autori distanti fra loro nel tempo e nello spazio: da Basquiat a Cézanne, da Picasso a Witkin, da Mapplethorpe a Hirst (per citarne solo alcuni). Abbiamo parlato di tanto in tanto, qui su Bizzarro Bazar, di come la morte sia stata negata e occultata nell’ultimo secolo in Occidente; e di come oggi la sua spettacolarizzazione tenda a renderla ancora meno reale, più immaginata, pensata cioè per immagini. Zanchetta aggiunge un tassello importante a questa idea, con il suo resoconto di un simbolo che era un tempo essenziale, e si presenta ormai stanco e abusato.

Bill Bass e Jon Jefferson

LA VERA FABBRICA DEI CORPI

(2006, TEA)

Non lasciatevi ingannare dalla fuorviante traduzione del titolo originale (che si riferisce invece alla “fattoria dei corpi”). Il libro di Bass e Jefferson non parla né di androidi né di clonazioni, ma della nascita e dello sviluppo della rete di cosiddette body farms americane, fondate dallo stesso Bass: strutture universitarie in cui si studia la decomposizione umana a fini scientifici e, soprattutto, forensici. Il lavoro e la specializzazione del professor Bass è infatti comprendere, a partire da resti umani, la data e/o l’ora esatta della morte, nonché le modalità del decesso. Per raggiungere la precisione necessaria a scagionare o accusare un imputato di omicidio, gli antropologi forensi hanno dovuto comprendere a fondo come si “comporta” un cadavere in tutte le situazioni immaginabili, come reagisce agli elementi esterni, quale fauna entomologica si ciba dei resti e in quale successione temporale si avvicendano le ondate di larve e insetti. Nelle body farms, un centinaio di cadaveri all’anno vengono lasciati alle intemperie, bruciati, immersi nell’acqua, nel ghiaccio… Negli anni il dottor Bass ha ottenuto una serie di risultati decisivi per far luce su innumerevoli misteri, confluiti in un archivio consultato da tutte le polizie del mondo. Questo simpatico vecchietto oggi, guardando i resti di un cadavere, riesce a capire in breve tempo come è morto, se è stato spostato dopo la morte, da quanto tempo, eccetera.

Questo libro è uno di quelli che si leggono tutti d’un fiato, e per più di un motivo. Innanzitutto, lo stile scorrevole e semplice degli autori non è privo di una buona dose di umorismo, che aiuta a “digerire” anche i dettagli più macabri. In secondo luogo, le informazioni scientifiche sono precise e sorprendenti: non potremmo immaginare in quanti e quali modi un cadavere possa “mentire” riguardo alle sue origini, finché Bass non ci confessa tutte le false piste in cui è caduto, gli errori commessi, le situazioni senza apparente spiegazione in cui si è ritrovato. Perché La vera fabbrica dei corpi è anche un libro giallo, a suo modo, e racconta le investigazioni svoltesi in diversi casi celebri di cronaca nera. E, infine, il grande valore di queste pagine è quello di raccontarci una vita avventurosa, strana e particolare, di caccia ai killer, in stretto contatto quotidiano con la morte; la vita di un uomo che dichiara di conoscere ormai fin troppo bene il suo destino, e dice di trovare conforto nell’idea che, una volta morto, vivrà negli esseri che si sfameranno con il suo corpo. Un uomo dalla voce ironica e pacata che, nonostante tutti questi anni, continua “ad odiare le mosche”.

Strane macchine fotografiche

Wayne Martin Belger, nato nel 1964, ha un curriculum che si potrebbe definire perlomeno eclettico: ha fatto il cercatore di tesori professionista, l’istruttore di roccia così come di scuba diving, il musicista, il giocatore di hockey, il guidatore di treni e il manicure. Ma ora pare aver trovato la sua strada.

Le macchine fotografiche che costruisce sono le più incredibili al mondo. Si tratta di apparecchi stenoscopici, vale a dire fotocamere che sfruttano il concetto di camera oscura nel momento dello scatto. La fotocamera utilizza un foro stenopeico (dal greco stenos opaios, dotato di uno stretto foro), in pratica un semplice foro posizionato al centro di un lato della fotocamera, come obiettivo. La pellicola viene impressionata dalla luce che penetra nel foro. Per far sì che l’immagine sia nitida, è necessario un tempo di esposizione di quasi due ore.

Ma non è questo che rende le sue macchine fotografiche particolari. Wayne Belger, infatti, le costruisce a seconda del soggetto che dovrà fotografare. Lo strumento diviene una sorta di “altare” magico che permette di catturare l’essenza stessa dell’oggetto della foto. Ecco allora che le sue fotocamere diventano degli ibridi postmoderni di metallo, legno e materia organica.

Facciamo un esempio: volendo fotografare delle donne all’ottavo mese di gravidanza, Belger progetta e costruisce una macchina stenoscopica che contiene al suo interno il cuore (vero) di un bambino.

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Questo gli permette di rendere “sacro” il suo strumento, e visto che i tempi di esposizione sono così lunghi, di trasformare l’atto di fotografare in un rituale che unisce, come in un procedimento alchemico, la luce e il tempo. Ecco alcune delle foto scattate con questa macchina fotografica:

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Altri esempi: per una serie di fotografie che ritraggono preti, imam o rabbini in preghiera, Berger ha costruito una macchina fotografica che contiene al suo interno parti della Bibbia, del Corano, della Torah, e un pezzo metallico che faceva parte dell’armatura architettonica delle Torri Gemelle.

Un altro pezzo della sua collezione è ricavato dal teschio autentico di una ragazzina di 13 anni, nel quale il foro per le fotografie è stato praticato all’incirca all’altezza del famoso Terzo Occhio della mistica orientale.

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Ma lo strumento probabilmente più bizzarro ed estremo è la cosiddetta untouchable camera (“la macchina fotografica intoccabile”). Si tratta di un pezzo realizzato per una serie di fotografie di malati di AIDS. Belger ha disegnato questo apparecchio, che al posto dei comuni filtri fotografici ha delle lastre di vetro contenenti il sangue positivo all’HIV dei suoi soggetti. Attraverso il loro stesso sangue infetto, Belger ha dunque fotografato, mettendoli in posa per due ore, alcuni malati, ottenendo fotografie suggestive ed evocative. Sono scatti forti, potenti, reminiscenti di certo dell’opera di Witkin, ma ancora più commoventi se si pensa al metodo quasi “religioso” con cui sono stati ottenuti.

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Ecco il link al sito di Wayne Martin Belger.