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Foreign Body: Photography and the Prelude to Genetic ModificationJanuary 11 - March
17, 2002
Recent advances in genetic research have brought us to the threshold of a new era in human engineering. What was once the mere fabrication of science fiction, motion pictures, and theoretical science is closer to concrete realization. But the fascination with fantastic human creatures has also been inspired by the existence of singular people who have shaped by either accident or nature. Their unique physical characteristics include facial and body anomalies, extreme height or weight, wounds and other injuries, and the alterations of plastic surgery and prosthetics. The promise of the genetic revolution is that these anomaliescould either be prevented — in the case of genetic disease — or altered, by performing an even more radical modification of the human body: changing its genetic code. Many observers believe that we are on the brink of producing a new configuration of the human being.The photographs in this exhibition will provide an informal history of the unorthodox human body and raise critical questions about what the coming technologies of genetic modification will mean. Foreign Body: Photography and the Prelude to Genetic Modification will contain medical and scientific photographs, portraiture, and popular imagery. Among the images that will be displayed are a dagerreotype of precocious sexual development in a child (1852); images of religious hysteria taken in the 1870s for Dr. Jean-Marie Charcot; an albumen print of the brain of Charles J. Guiteau, the man who assassinated President Garfield (1882); and stereographs of Chang and Eng, the original "Siamese" twins, taken at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1874. This exhibition will be the second in a series of six exhibitions organized by ICP curator Carol Squiers, entitled Imaging the Future: The Intersection of Science, Technology and Photography, which will examine the impact that photography and other imaging systems have had on humnity's growing knowledge of the very foundations of life.
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