Photography of Objectification

From a philosophical perspective, there has been constant interest with the human body as an essential tool much revered as or thought of as a mere machine. French philosopher Rene Descartes extensively argued in his animal-machine theory that the human body did also function like an automaton, much like an animal’s body, with replaceable parts to cater and adapt to malfunctions. Through art and photography, this reflection about the essential role of the human body eventually manifested itself. The idea of focusing on the body as a main object (hence objectification) or focus point in a photograph started in paintings long before the invention of cameras as a probable consequence of the gradual interest in humanism. With time, body image was dissected particularly by feminists regarding the function and implications of some erotic photographs mainly of women nudes.

The fascination with the body as noumenon can be attested to have taken true momentum with new technologies, particularly in the field of genetics and medicine which resulted in the epiphanic hype that humans themselves had the capacity of altering human bodies. Moreover the range of photographic representations of the body expanded through media globalization and divergence. Thus, photographs of human bodies were caught up in social, racial, gender and ethical struggles in the interpretation of their meanings and uses.

Subsequently, this research paper principally attempts to review and convey the objectification of the human body through the practice of photography in various representations of the human body not only as a subject but also as an object. Indeed, the chapter “The subject as object: Photography and the human body” by Michelle Henning mainly cites fo...

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...sm: in a sense, photography enlivens the dead and gives immortality. The latter is a quality which make a photograph work as a fetish, its immobility and silence its ability to preserve a past moment, are the same qualities associated with death as is rendered rather obvious through Susan Sontag “All photographs are memento mori.”

This chapter adequately demonstrates that photography of the body hinges on the relationship between photography and reality but also it is one of the means by which individuals are constructed as social subjects to the extent that it participates in disciplining the body. A photograph constructs different meaning for human bodies through the way it represents them but also as an ideologically generic medium about sex, race and humanity altogether but also through why it uses humans as ends but as means.

Works Cited

Michelle, Henning