sadgirlseven
01 Jun 2003, 04:28 PM
ny times ran a piece about thomas condon in today's edition. it's mostly about the history of photographing the dead, but it's a good article. i would just post a link, but you'd have to log in or create an account in order to read it. so here it is:
June 1, 2003
Is the Body More Beautiful When It's Dead?
By ELEANOR HEARTNEY
Unless the Ohio Supreme Court takes his case, the Cincinnati photographer Thomas Condon will soon be returning to jail for corpse abuse. The crime conjures unsavory images of Victorian grave robbery and necrophilia. Mr. Condon said his intention, however, was to create works of art.
The case touches on American culture's ambivalence toward death, public suspicion of "crazy" artists and questions of privacy and free speech. It also shines the spotlight on Cincinnati's contentious relationship to contemporary art.
In 1990, Cincinnati prosecutors tried Dennis Barrie, then the director of the Contemporary Arts Center, on obscenity charges for hanging a controversial retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. (He was acquitted.) In 1995, the city prosecuted the Pink Pyramid bookshop for renting out a video of Pasolini's 1975 "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom." (The Pyramid paid a $500 fine in a plea agreement.)
In this case, Mr. Condon, 30, was arrested after a commercial film developer gave police a set of negatives taken at the Hamilton County morgue. Mr. Condon, who had been negotiating with the coroner's office about making a training film, said he took the pictures for a private art project. He photographed corpses juxtaposed with various objects signifying the cycle of life and death. Some of the confiscated negatives were mysteriously leaked to the local press, inciting a public furor as relatives of the deceased and local pundits denounced Mr. Condon's project as "sick" and "repulsive."
Despite support from civil libertarian groups like the National Coalition Against Censorship, Mr. Condon was convicted and imprisoned from April to August 2002, after which he was released pending appeal. Now a state appeals court has affirmed his conviction, meaning he may face another 13 months in jail.
The complicated legal issues revolve around questions like: Did the artist have permission to take photographs? Was permission needed? Can a photographer be held responsible for the unauthorized publication of his images? (Mr. Condon said he intended to crop out all identifying details.) Does photographing dead bodies in the company of objects like shells and sheet music constitute desecration?
From an aesthetic point of view, things are much simpler. Mr. Condon's project is part of a well-established artistic tradition. Dead bodies appear in everything from medieval tomb sculpture to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" and Goya's "Disasters of War." The case is even clearer for photography. During the Victorian era, photographs of family members on their death beds, often arranged as if they were merely sleeping, were exchanged by relatives and friends, made into postcards and encased in lockets. The darker side of death was chronicled by photojournalists like the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, whose gruesome images of dead soldiers were widely reproduced in illustrated weeklies. In the 30's and 40's, Weegee gained acclaim for photographs of murdered gangsters lying in pools of blood.
Sometime in the middle of the 20th century, things changed. As death was relocated from home to hospital, post-mortem photographs began to disappear. Survivors were counseled to "move on" and avoid morbid attachments to the dead. Standards of taste shifted. Life magazine got into trouble in 1943 when it published a photograph by George Stock of three American soldiers killed in World War II. Weegee retired from the crime beat for a more respectable career as an art photographer. By 1969, in her groundbreaking book "On Death and Dying," Elisabeth Kübler-Ross could write that death is a "dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in modern society."
This issue came dramatically to the fore during the Iraq war, when American photographers and news outlets revisited a problem raised earlier in Vietnam and Somalia and grappled with the question of how graphic their coverage should be. In a report on National Public Radio, David Leeson, a senior photographer for The Dallas Morning News, discussed his inability to photograph a civilian casualty. He said, "This man had been shot behind the wheel of his car and when I got to the car he had no face. It just didn't seem fitting for human life to be photographed in that state. So, I just didn't do it. I walked away from it and went and found something else to photograph." In the end, American audiences saw far less explicit imagery than their European and Arabic counterparts.
Yet this sensitivity exposes a contradiction in contemporary culture, part of which also finds a voyeuristic thrill in images of death presented in a pop context. One of HBO's top-rated series, "Six Feet Under," takes place in a funeral home. Popular film directors like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Craven bury appreciative audiences in gore and body parts. "Body Worlds," an exhibition in London last year of real flayed bodies stiffened with plasticine and arranged in lifelike poses, drew 840,000 visitors.
These mixed messages have made death an almost irresistible subject for artists seeking to get under the skin of a complacent society. One of the most remarked upon works of the last Whitney Biennial was A. A. Bronson's photograph "Felix Partz, June 5, 1994," which presented his friend and partner moments after his death from AIDS. Mr. Partz's eyes are still open, gazing from a skeletal face whose starkness contrasts oddly with the gaudy mix of patterns and colors in the surrounding bedclothes. Likening the picture to medieval funerary sculptures depicting the dead in early stages of decomposition, Mr. Bronson said: "The image becomes universal. It is about the death that each of us must face, our own death."
References to traditional Christian images of death reappear in the work of the photographer Andres Serrano, whom Mr. Condon cites as an important influence. Mr. Serrano's `Morgue Series" are lush photographs of bodies in an unidentified morgue that have been cropped to echo Renaissance representations of themes like the Nativity or the Deposition of Christ. Despite the often grisly circumstances of death, Mr. Serrano invests these images with a luminous beauty, reminding us that in the Christian tradition, death is simply a threshold between two states of being. He said in an interview: "I never saw the bodies as cadavers or corpses. I called them my models, my subjects. I was interested in the way they still had a human presence, that something of their soul was intact."
Other artists find inspiration in the field of medicine, which, many have argued, serves as secular society's substitute for religion. This approach is evident in "Mütter Museum," a recently published book filled with beautiful photographs of dead bodies, medical abnormalities and assorted body parts. A production of the Mütter Museum, a 19th-century style medical museum maintained by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the book chronicles the institution's long and fruitful interaction with artists.
Gretchen Wordon, director of the museum and author of the book, said, "Artists come to the collection for different reasons — some are fascinated with death, deterioration, deformity, while others are interested in the presentation of the past, or the inherent beauty of the body." Paradoxically, she argues, "there is even more beauty in a body which is no longer living. There is no pretense. It says: this will be you someday, just as this was someone."
Allan Ludwig, in collaboration with his wife, Gwen Akin, has created numerous photographs that play the romantic beauty of the platinum print process against morbid subject matter like the Mütter's sliced heads in formaldehyde or skeletons of fused twins. He sees a double standard in the raised eyebrows. "If this is done under the cloak of science it becomes palatable," he said. "Scientists get a cultural free pass. They say they are not interested in macabre stuff but there they are in the lab sawing skulls apart."
DO artists have a different set of responsibilities when it comes to death? The artist Alfredo Jaar suggests they do. In 1994 he went to Rwanda to document the aftermath of the genocidal massacres between Hutus and Tutsis. But after taking more than 3,000 photographs, he decided not to show them. He had seen many images of Rwanda victims in the European (though not the American) press. He said: "Now, I said to myself, I have the same kind of images. But these no longer provoke any reaction. I need to create a new strategy of representation." So he enclosed the photographs in black boxes and attached a written description of the hidden images. In so doing, he said, "I hoped that words would help people focus on the real meaning of images that had been decontextualized by the media."
In the end, it would appear that Mr. Condon's real crime was to meddle with a set of unspoken cultural taboos in a city that does not take such matters lightly. Death at a historical or emotional remove may provide safe entertainment, but death in actual fact still scares us.
Mr. Condon began with very different expectations. "I wanted to help people come to an acceptance that this is what the body is," he said. "The body represents a life lived. It's a road map to the person's life. When the body is opened up and exposed this way, its a very beautiful thing."
Eleanor Heartney is the author of ``Post modern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art,'' to be published in February by Midmarch Arts Press.
June 1, 2003
Is the Body More Beautiful When It's Dead?
By ELEANOR HEARTNEY
Unless the Ohio Supreme Court takes his case, the Cincinnati photographer Thomas Condon will soon be returning to jail for corpse abuse. The crime conjures unsavory images of Victorian grave robbery and necrophilia. Mr. Condon said his intention, however, was to create works of art.
The case touches on American culture's ambivalence toward death, public suspicion of "crazy" artists and questions of privacy and free speech. It also shines the spotlight on Cincinnati's contentious relationship to contemporary art.
In 1990, Cincinnati prosecutors tried Dennis Barrie, then the director of the Contemporary Arts Center, on obscenity charges for hanging a controversial retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. (He was acquitted.) In 1995, the city prosecuted the Pink Pyramid bookshop for renting out a video of Pasolini's 1975 "Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom." (The Pyramid paid a $500 fine in a plea agreement.)
In this case, Mr. Condon, 30, was arrested after a commercial film developer gave police a set of negatives taken at the Hamilton County morgue. Mr. Condon, who had been negotiating with the coroner's office about making a training film, said he took the pictures for a private art project. He photographed corpses juxtaposed with various objects signifying the cycle of life and death. Some of the confiscated negatives were mysteriously leaked to the local press, inciting a public furor as relatives of the deceased and local pundits denounced Mr. Condon's project as "sick" and "repulsive."
Despite support from civil libertarian groups like the National Coalition Against Censorship, Mr. Condon was convicted and imprisoned from April to August 2002, after which he was released pending appeal. Now a state appeals court has affirmed his conviction, meaning he may face another 13 months in jail.
The complicated legal issues revolve around questions like: Did the artist have permission to take photographs? Was permission needed? Can a photographer be held responsible for the unauthorized publication of his images? (Mr. Condon said he intended to crop out all identifying details.) Does photographing dead bodies in the company of objects like shells and sheet music constitute desecration?
From an aesthetic point of view, things are much simpler. Mr. Condon's project is part of a well-established artistic tradition. Dead bodies appear in everything from medieval tomb sculpture to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" and Goya's "Disasters of War." The case is even clearer for photography. During the Victorian era, photographs of family members on their death beds, often arranged as if they were merely sleeping, were exchanged by relatives and friends, made into postcards and encased in lockets. The darker side of death was chronicled by photojournalists like the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, whose gruesome images of dead soldiers were widely reproduced in illustrated weeklies. In the 30's and 40's, Weegee gained acclaim for photographs of murdered gangsters lying in pools of blood.
Sometime in the middle of the 20th century, things changed. As death was relocated from home to hospital, post-mortem photographs began to disappear. Survivors were counseled to "move on" and avoid morbid attachments to the dead. Standards of taste shifted. Life magazine got into trouble in 1943 when it published a photograph by George Stock of three American soldiers killed in World War II. Weegee retired from the crime beat for a more respectable career as an art photographer. By 1969, in her groundbreaking book "On Death and Dying," Elisabeth Kübler-Ross could write that death is a "dreaded and unspeakable issue to be avoided by every means possible in modern society."
This issue came dramatically to the fore during the Iraq war, when American photographers and news outlets revisited a problem raised earlier in Vietnam and Somalia and grappled with the question of how graphic their coverage should be. In a report on National Public Radio, David Leeson, a senior photographer for The Dallas Morning News, discussed his inability to photograph a civilian casualty. He said, "This man had been shot behind the wheel of his car and when I got to the car he had no face. It just didn't seem fitting for human life to be photographed in that state. So, I just didn't do it. I walked away from it and went and found something else to photograph." In the end, American audiences saw far less explicit imagery than their European and Arabic counterparts.
Yet this sensitivity exposes a contradiction in contemporary culture, part of which also finds a voyeuristic thrill in images of death presented in a pop context. One of HBO's top-rated series, "Six Feet Under," takes place in a funeral home. Popular film directors like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Craven bury appreciative audiences in gore and body parts. "Body Worlds," an exhibition in London last year of real flayed bodies stiffened with plasticine and arranged in lifelike poses, drew 840,000 visitors.
These mixed messages have made death an almost irresistible subject for artists seeking to get under the skin of a complacent society. One of the most remarked upon works of the last Whitney Biennial was A. A. Bronson's photograph "Felix Partz, June 5, 1994," which presented his friend and partner moments after his death from AIDS. Mr. Partz's eyes are still open, gazing from a skeletal face whose starkness contrasts oddly with the gaudy mix of patterns and colors in the surrounding bedclothes. Likening the picture to medieval funerary sculptures depicting the dead in early stages of decomposition, Mr. Bronson said: "The image becomes universal. It is about the death that each of us must face, our own death."
References to traditional Christian images of death reappear in the work of the photographer Andres Serrano, whom Mr. Condon cites as an important influence. Mr. Serrano's `Morgue Series" are lush photographs of bodies in an unidentified morgue that have been cropped to echo Renaissance representations of themes like the Nativity or the Deposition of Christ. Despite the often grisly circumstances of death, Mr. Serrano invests these images with a luminous beauty, reminding us that in the Christian tradition, death is simply a threshold between two states of being. He said in an interview: "I never saw the bodies as cadavers or corpses. I called them my models, my subjects. I was interested in the way they still had a human presence, that something of their soul was intact."
Other artists find inspiration in the field of medicine, which, many have argued, serves as secular society's substitute for religion. This approach is evident in "Mütter Museum," a recently published book filled with beautiful photographs of dead bodies, medical abnormalities and assorted body parts. A production of the Mütter Museum, a 19th-century style medical museum maintained by the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the book chronicles the institution's long and fruitful interaction with artists.
Gretchen Wordon, director of the museum and author of the book, said, "Artists come to the collection for different reasons — some are fascinated with death, deterioration, deformity, while others are interested in the presentation of the past, or the inherent beauty of the body." Paradoxically, she argues, "there is even more beauty in a body which is no longer living. There is no pretense. It says: this will be you someday, just as this was someone."
Allan Ludwig, in collaboration with his wife, Gwen Akin, has created numerous photographs that play the romantic beauty of the platinum print process against morbid subject matter like the Mütter's sliced heads in formaldehyde or skeletons of fused twins. He sees a double standard in the raised eyebrows. "If this is done under the cloak of science it becomes palatable," he said. "Scientists get a cultural free pass. They say they are not interested in macabre stuff but there they are in the lab sawing skulls apart."
DO artists have a different set of responsibilities when it comes to death? The artist Alfredo Jaar suggests they do. In 1994 he went to Rwanda to document the aftermath of the genocidal massacres between Hutus and Tutsis. But after taking more than 3,000 photographs, he decided not to show them. He had seen many images of Rwanda victims in the European (though not the American) press. He said: "Now, I said to myself, I have the same kind of images. But these no longer provoke any reaction. I need to create a new strategy of representation." So he enclosed the photographs in black boxes and attached a written description of the hidden images. In so doing, he said, "I hoped that words would help people focus on the real meaning of images that had been decontextualized by the media."
In the end, it would appear that Mr. Condon's real crime was to meddle with a set of unspoken cultural taboos in a city that does not take such matters lightly. Death at a historical or emotional remove may provide safe entertainment, but death in actual fact still scares us.
Mr. Condon began with very different expectations. "I wanted to help people come to an acceptance that this is what the body is," he said. "The body represents a life lived. It's a road map to the person's life. When the body is opened up and exposed this way, its a very beautiful thing."
Eleanor Heartney is the author of ``Post modern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art,'' to be published in February by Midmarch Arts Press.