Liz Wells: Photography, A critical Introduction

This book has really helped me in a number of modules, including on cyborgs. Wells talks about all areas of the medium critically. I have looked at the third edition of the book for the following information...

The Body as Machine

The part of the book I looked at was titled "the body as Machine", where I found a number of examples where photographers/ artists had merged technology or machine with body. One of Hannah Hoch's images are in the book titled "the Beautiful Girl".

Under the image Wells has written "The photomontages of the Dada artist Hannah Hoch celebrate 'the new woman' , playfully juxtaposing magazine images of women with photographs of machine parts, but also seem critical of the uniform, idealised and machine- like mannequins depicted in the same machines." (Pg 185) 

This image of Hoch's is quite typical of the time, often merging human parts with car parts. 

Another image featured in this section was of Hans Bellmers' "first doll" in 1934, where he is photographed with a part machine doll. 

He is also photographed in the image, it was said he had an obsession with dolls and did many installations involving them. In this one he merges the doll with machine parts. After researching this artist further I found this quote by him talking about his work:-

"The Doll project for me was a way of playing with language, of disarticulating language at the level of the syllable very often. It was also a way of setting up word games, puns—some of them fairly bad, others very sexual, erotic, of adding on games where you suddenly switch into French. This is a way of thinking about this multiple body"

 (http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/vol_3_no_3/bergvall/nathan-brown-objects-that-matter.html)

In the first brief we were shown some car advertisements that played with cars merging with there owners, in this book I found an advertisement which sowed this. 

In a section of the book, Wells talks about the advertising campaign for Saab, a car in 1998. She talks about the themes which are addressed in the campaign and this certain leaflet/ poster, she addresses the link between body and machine that this car brings. The top image on the poster show a women's body merging with a seat car. In the description of the ad it says " the Saab's movement transfers directly to your body," emphasising the connection/ fluidity between the car and its owner. The campaign tries to reassure the harmlessness of this car. Wells also talks about advertising going further by using this kind of manipulation. The skin in this Saab example has been manipulated into a plasticity beyond the actual human body.

"Digital manipulation of photograph gives the body a photo- real malleability related to the fluidity given by film special effects, most importantly the liquid metal body of the T-1000 in the film Terminator 2. As with the plasmatic character of animation, this can be understood in Utopian terms, as enabling us to imagine a new and liberating cyborg, "post human" body, or in distopian terms, as part of the continued objectification of the human body, in a culture where body parts are increasingly understood as commodities."

I found this source really helpful in understanding past examples of generations being cyborg like, from being in cars or just increasingly using technology upgrades.

Technological bodies- The camera as mechanical eye (Pg 180, 3rd edition)

This section I found really useful, because of the link to my first eye edits which merged with the camera lens. In this section Wells talks about how the camera becomes a part of the photographer.

The image featured on this page is of women using stereoscopes in the late 19th Century in France. It gives us a reminder that women as well as man enjoyed "optical toys" (as Wells put it) and the pleasure of spectorship.

In 1920s/ 30s the camera became noted as a mechanical eye. Dziga Vertov, a soviet film maker expresses this in the following quote written in the book:-

"I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the only way I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility... My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you." (1923, quoted in Berger).

Walter Benjamin is also said to have  expressed the ability of film and photography to expand perception. 

" The camera is one of a number of machines which appear to be like prosthetics in that we treat them as extensions of our own bodies but which change the ways we physically engage with the world. The very presence of the camera transforms the scenes, it intervenes reality. The camera threatens to take over and displace the eye: it gets between the viewer and the viewed and 'shapes reality according to its terms', (Krauss, 1986)." (Pg 182/3, Wells)