Anatomy

Anatomy (2014-2015)

These images come from a book entitled Anatomy for Art Students that first appeared in 1896.  I used the fourth edition, published in 1915.

The people in this book’s illustrative photographs are as tender, in my eyes, as they are remote and inscrutable.  Their frozen gestures and their blank expressions suggest to me far more than the book was intended to convey.  I am intrigued by the simple grace of these anonymous people from another era, still posing in these silent pages.  They seem every bit as remarkable as figures on a Greek vase.  But these are, pointedly and poignantly, real and particular people.  The intrinsic matter-of-factness of photography communicates this plainly.  There is nothing heroic or abstract about these men and women.  They were probably just eking out an existence by posing for an earnest book of illustrated instructions for art students.  But they seem to me to exist in a world of reflection and longing and resignation and nobility that far transcends the simple purpose they were meant to fulfill.