Recently I was disturbed to come across this photograph (in unedited form) in an exhibition by the M
Recently I was disturbed to come across this photograph (in unedited form) in an exhibition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled “Naked Before the Camera." It is titled "Hermaphrodite,” and was taken in 1860 by a French photographer who named himself Nadar. All the other photographs in the online exhibit are art portraits of nudes, their subjects apparently consenting to serve as models. The poses are classical or arty, mostly full-body, and none of them gynecological. So it was very jarring to me to come across this photograph of an intersex hospital patient, hiding hir face behind hir arm, hir intermediate genitalia the focal point for this prurient spreadshot. I see exploitation, nonconsent, shame and exposure–disturbing factors mostly absent in the other, nonclinical, photos. (The rest of the series by Nadar can been seen on Wikipedia, and contains even more humiliating and uncomfortable photographs, which I will not share here.) I fail to understand why the Metropolitan would include such a shockingly disrespectful image in their collection of nudes–at least, not without discussing how clinical nude photography has been used to marginalize and other and exploit patients with marked bodily differences. As an intersex person and a Jew, I’d say this is rather like including a photograph of a nude victim of medical experimentation in a concentration camp, without remarking on the Holocaust or the horror involved. It’s creepy and upsetting to see a member of my community forced to spread hir legs, not only for a 19th century medical audience, but for a 21st century museum crowd to stare at and go “Hmm. Interesting use of depth of field to foreground the strange genitalia!” -- source link
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