Paul Caffell

‘The Anatomist’ by Paul Caffell

‘The Body was never a free gift; it gives us temporary shelter to our aspirations on a finite lease. We try to preserve and commemorate its tenure.’
Benjamin A.Rifkin, ‘The Art of Anatomy.

Central to much of Paul Caffell’s photographic work lays a fascination with both the formal properties and astonishing mysteries of the human body. This series, ‘The Anatomist’, is to do with the enthralment provided by the realm of anatomical illustration. Traditionally the artist was required to study anatomy, to delve into the usually inscrutable territory of the body’s interior as a tool to depict its exterior more competently. Although this undertaking was done on the basis of objective classification and analysis, this arena itself is permeated with the themes of visual seduction, erotic suggestiveness in the unwrapping of the body, and bound up with unavoidable meditations on the still somewhat ungraspable subject of death.

It is the ready-made beauty of the anatomical illustrations that must have lead Caffell to the departure of using colour photography for several of the images within the series. A remarkable instance is provided by the backdrop of a colour work by Jaques Fabien Gautier D’Agoty, who by the way helped develop the colour printing process in the eighteenth century, of women holding serene gazes despite their skin and wombs being peeled back and sliced every which way. In these colour images we see the striking red of more figures of paper anatomy, twinned yet in different stages of serial dissection. They exist as liftable flaps, which enable the following of their path from bone to skin. (Although on a trajectory, this pair is not as animated as many other vintage illustrations of cadavers that are often depicted as negotiating the landscape or displaying empathetic life-like qualities despite being, for example, flayed, or gazing serenely despite dissection). However these twins seem to be still standing on their own two feet. The figures do seem to be drawn as objectively as possible to provide raw information, and remain on a vertical plane perhaps to aid a visual coherence of form. In contrast, the foregrounding figure is in the desublimatory position of the horizontal, lying on the blackness like this the body is brought down to earth and aligned with a more base materialism than if elevated, as if simply a corpse for study on the floor of Théodore Géricault’s studio. The figure does resonate with a sort of timeless quality found in classical art, however, this figure is very much alive. Unlike the anatomical drawing that presents the body as data, this figure sees to enact throughout the sequence the empathetic pathos and vulnerability of inhabiting flesh and bone. The presence of the framing bones is emphasized in the print, the body is not inside out, yet the awareness of mortality is heightened by the sense of perhaps loosing identity and becoming anatomized.

In the next sequence, we see a male figure alongside the disrobed female. At first glance he is read as the protagonist and she the subjected character; he, the ‘Anatomist’, often holding various instruments of measurement or alongside the motif of the skull. These scenes are also backgrounded by various anatomical images. Again we have pictures within pictures. Sometimes the illustrations themselves contain such reflexive baroque devices as framed images or mirrors reflecting other details, making more informative details comprehendible in one single image. This reflexivity, here in order to further explicate the body to itself, extends further to the photographic framing of the scene and the relations it contains. Despite my positing of the presumed roles of the presented characters, the relation between them often seems enigmatic and extends through the triangulation between them the photographer and us Still the images hold something eerily ungraspable. The anatomist seems to exist as a somewhat detached presence, and the motivation of the female’s appearance emerges as ambiguous. Here she is very calm and self-contained, perhaps offering herself up to be measured as an exemplar of perfect proportion. (Historically the figure of the male was used as the general anatomical template, the female stomach mainly pertinent as a window to the womb, and the mysteries of it’s workings and systems of gentitalia often vague or inaccurately depicted, despite allegedly being often studied as a pretext to illustrate a sensual nude in the semblance of medical reference). Here she is unwrapped and calm, dwelling in her attributes of beauty and the pair exist in silence. But at times the inflection of the ‘model’ is somewhat seductive and the quality of the flesh gives an almost tactile resonance to the relation of the bodies, naked and smooth contested with clothed and hirsute. This contrast and intonation of seduction can cause the macabre notion that the woman is willingly offering herself up to something akin to a murder ballad by Mr. Cave, an eager collusion with the polarities of beauty and horror, sex and death. However, her alabaster surfaces remain unbroken, there is no invasive or violent act precipitated, the scientific and romantic ambiguities linger on the skin and not beyond.

These bodies are not destined for formaldehyde, neither for the spectacle of the medical laboratory nor of the gallery. The only dissection that occurs is due to the contingency of the photographic framing. The artist arranges the scene and plays with its formal organization; the shapes of the sometimes cropped or cut off figures echo and reiterate in the representational space. Notably the body as fragment is often fetishised in art and visual ‘amputations’ feature a great deal throughout twentieth century pictorial tradition. However, despite the formal pleasure of these sculptural like figures within this series and despite them being aligned with anatomical illustrations which have shed the identity of the subjects, here the body is not merely an inanimate object; it is immured in time in meditative relation to this ‘lease’ of our own bodies.

Melissa Moore MA