Subject as Object

Well’s “The Subject as Object: Photography and the Human Body” explores the “late 1980s and 1990s…extraordinary number of photographic practices and critical texts [that] took the human body as their central subject.” This interest in the body in photography during this period, Wells explains, may be “linked to the emergence of new critical theories and ‘body politics’” as well as “social crises” such as the AIDS epidemic. 

An interest in new technologies, in relation to genetics and medicine in the form of cloning, genetically modified food, and the technological altering of our bodies, also contributed to this altered representation of the human body.

Fran Herbello’s Untitled illustrates how these influences contributed to the representation of the human body in photography. In this image Herbello “represents the body as a kind of attire.” The figure is positioned with his back to the viewer. The photograph is cropped to show the bottom of the head, the neck and part of the back. The focal point of the image is the clothing tag sewn into the center of the shoulders, stitching into the skin leading the viewer inward. The portrayal of a tag sewn into human flesh makes a comment on the idea of altering the human body through medicine and technology through a shocking photographic image.