by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Philadelphia's MÅtter Museum is one of the last medical museums from the
19th century.
In the '90s, curator Laura Lindgren invited photographers to take pictures using objects from the museum. She later turned the pictures into calendars. Some photographs found their way to exhibition in "Extraordinary Bodies: Photographs from the MÅtter Museum," which runs through April 15 at the Albuquerque Museum. The exhibition has been traveling since 2003 and combines contemporary works with old photographs taken straight off the museum's walls.
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Photography was originally used to document medical cases and for doctors to share information. In this case, the medical world is presented artistically.
The exhibit is worth the visit for medical students, regular people and enthusiasts in every field having to do with people, history, medicine or photography.
"I directed seven calendars for the
museum," she said. "I invited photographers to come and photograph in the museum. That exhibition is the culmination of about a decade of work putting those calendars
together."
Along with works by local artist Joel-Peter Witkin and William Wegman - known for posing his Weimaraner dogs as people - there are terrifying and unbelievable images on the walls, mostly the older photographs of real medical cases. In the guest book, several people wrote that there should be a warning sign posted outside the gallery to let parents know their kids might be upset by the images.
There are photographs of miscarried triplets, lifelike wax sculptures of a face detached from its head and a woman with a spine that curves into an S to such a degree that you feel your own spine starting to curl the longer you look at her. The overall theme is deformation and miscellaneous oddities of the human body.
There are also photographs of shrunken heads, a facial tumor so large it has pushed the face's features out of place and a
soldier whose face caught a shell fragment and left a hole in his cheek from which saliva
would drip.
The cutest photograph in the exhibit is of fetal skeletons from two to nine months propped up on stands. Each skeleton smiles sweetly, like Halloween decorations,
but real.
The most beautiful piece in the show is Witkin's "Harvest."
He uses a wax model of a face showing the exposed lymphatics of the neck. Witkin ornaments the figure with elegant plants, so it looks like the face grew straight from a field and is ready to be harvested.
Wegman's work shows a dog drinking from the pelvis at the base of a deformed spine. At first glance, it looks like a hell-animal hybrid, as if the spine were a giant horn coming off the dog's head.
"The dogs like to work," Lindgren said. "He positions the dog, and the dog stays there. He'll bring a little dog bed for which ever one isn't working at the moment. One dog will lie down and look up like, 'Is it
my turn?'"
