Body in the Lens

March 6 to June 1, 1997

	Poster of the exhibition

On view at the Museum in 1997, the exhibition Body in the Lens presented a vast survey of the art of representing the human body in photography.

The Body in Question

Why is it that today more than ever before the human body is a centre of attention and anxiety? Is it the scourge of AIDS that fuels the concern, or the disembodiment implicit in the age of radio and television, telephone and computer? Or does this late twentieth-century angst have an even more profound source? As the body is being restructured and reconfigured by scientists and engineers, some of life's fundamental polarities — male and female, young and old, black and white, nature and culture, even life and death — are breaking down, blurring together. Simultaneously, artists and writers have come to reconsider the body, to rethink it.

It is one thing to ask a question; it is quite another to seek the answer — or answers. What William A. Ewing came up with by way of an answer to his provocative query about the contemporary preoccupation with the body was the exhibition Body in the Lens , a vast survey of the art of representing the human body in photography. His reflection on the subject — as fascinating as the question that gave rise to it is provocative — also provided the basis for a book, The Body: Photographs of the Human Form , published by Thames and Hudson in 1993. In adapting the book's material to the exhibition format, Ewing selected some two hundred images from major public and private collections in Europe and North America.

Body in the Lens was not a chronological overview of photographs of the human body from 1840 to today. Rather, it was a wide-ranging exploration of the various viewpoints from which photographers have depicted the body: artistic, commercial, medical, anthropological and ethnological.

The exhibition was divided into eight sections. "Form" presented the nude body, in whole and in part, approached by photographers in the classical tradition of painting and sculpture. "Probes" showed the body as the object of scientific research, measured and dissected for medical purposes. With "Idols", we embarked on the quest for physical perfection, wherein the medium of advertising creates an idealization of the body to promote its idolization. While "Flesh" presented the body as the object of carnal desire, "Dreams" recalled that all photographs involve transformations — of scale, framing and the compression of three dimensions into two and of time into a frozen instant — that make the most realistic-appearing nude a sort of illusion. "Mirrors" showed how the camera's lens turned in upon the photographer himself becomes a means of introspection capable of examining the soul's depths. "Others" brought us from the abstract representation of the body to the individual's inevitable confrontation with death, and all the irrationality, fear, even cruelty, that go along with it. "Politics" reminded us that everything is potentially political, and that, when it comes to influencing public opinion, photographs of the body can serve as an individual or visual strategy for conferring upon images a new and different meaning. These eight themes parallel the interest shown for the body in contemporary art.

Artists featured in Body in the Lens included photographers like Man Ray and Edvard Munch who were also painters, pioneers like Eadweard Muybridge and such recognized masters as Imogen Cunningham, Edward Steichen, Brassaï, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dieter Appelt, Andres Serrano, Diane Arbus, Richard Hamilton and Jacques-Henri Lartigue. Among the dozen Canadians represented were Geneviève Cadieux, John Max, Jana Sterbak and Donigan Cummings.

Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition Body in the Lens was presented exclusively in Montreal. Guided tours for the general public and groups of adults, as well as a lecture series, accompanied the exhibition.