"Do you see those humps, those hills on the left side? This is the pleuritis that your cousin had in his fifteenth year. [Do you see these caverns here? This is where the venom comes from, which intoxicates him"1
Experiments in recording microscopic images date back to the early history of photography. Among the many inventors attempting to photograph the world's fascinating microstructures (they include Thomas Wedgewood, John Benjamin Dancer, William Henry Fox Talbot and Humphry Davy, among others), the figure of physician Alfred François Donné stands out. In 1844 he published the first atlas of microscopic anatomy, based on the daguerreotype process. By the mid-nineteenth century, textbooks explaining the principles of microphotography and describing how to make them were already available (e.g., Joseph von Gerlach, 1863). Each successive change occurring in photographic technology also left its mark in the registration of tissues and structures invisible to the naked eye. However, it is not the history of this otherwise fascinating field of photography that is the subject of this text, but photography's ability to transform materiality into abstraction.
An excellent example of this process can be seen in the works of Larys Lubovitsky1. The author, a graduate of the UMB Faculty of Medicine and the UAP Department of Photography, shows the tissues of the human body: we see degenerative changes in the retina, chromosomes and cell nuclei, the inside of the abdominal cavity. At first it may seem disgusting, especially to people who are not related to medicine. We imagine blood, entrails, all that we reject from our subjectivity - this "abject," as Julia Kristeva might write. In Lubowicki's photographs, all this repulsiveness disappears. Is it really the body? We see galaxies of dots, clouds of color, overflowing rivers. For the vision of microphotography strips our bodies of materiality on the one hand, and on the other, transcends its boundaries to descend into the depths of ourselves.
This is probably what Walter Benjamin had in mind when, in 1936, he compared the work of a cameraman to that of a surgeon. The German philosopher wrote "the cameraman... penetrates deeply into the fabric of reality."2. Photography dissects the tissues, without the need for real cutting - it shows us an image of reality that we would not see without optical tools to magnify matter. It creates a paradoxical image, freeing itself from its object of reference (this feature of photography has already fascinated the Surrealists), and at the same time inevitably linked to it (because we know from experience that this type of photography always depicts something). In the series Corpus Hominis Lubowicki uses images obtained by various medical visualization techniques: taken with an optical microscope, electron microscope, tomograph. He also reaches out to classical X-ray imaging.
Berndt Stiegler calls photography a "preparation," "an autopsy of a living object that allows you to capture reality as an image, to craft it."3. The implication is that photography turns the living into the dead. However, Stiegler also recognizes the ability to revive a dead image through the work of the imagination. We resurrect by wandering "through photographic cuttings of the body," studying and combining one with the other4.
But why do we believe that these photos really show the human body? And are they not a blot of ink on paper, a mystification of the artist? The power of microphotography rests equally on the authority of science and photography itself as a tool. Such an intuition, moreover, is expressed by the author himself, writing, "photographs always need a material reality, even if they represent abstraction."6.
But isn't the concept of abstraction primarily formed in the viewer's mind when we can't relate the image to anything we know? And isn't our fascination with abstract photography precisely about wandering between the known and the unknown? For Lubowicki, the important thing seems to be the relation to reality, which is why the titles of individual photographs contain elements from two orders - an abstract code and number, and a description of the object, indicating the type of tissue being imaged. Intriguingly, the author shows mainly pathological tissues, as if these were more interesting and fascinating than healthy ones. Similarly, photography seems to function in Magic Mountain Thomas Mann. Here is court counselor Behrens, in a conversation with Hans Castorp, describing an X-ray of the lungs. And here, in the doctor's description, the image of the body becomes a landscape. Lubowicki's works, too, are associated with the surface of the earth photographed from a bird's eye view. The wall of the intestine looks like the dried surface of the desert, blood cells like pebbles on the beach. The body atlas turns out to be a geographical atlas.
Lubowicki shows the photographs in 140 x 140 cm format. The scale of the images makes the reference to microscopic images blurred. The abstract creations engulf the viewer, but the sense that we are looking at matter is not lost. Therein lies the power of photography, this material abstraction, suspended between body and image.
Photo Gallery pf , Larys Lubowicki, Corpus Hominis, 28.04 - 19.06.2022, curated by Dominika Karalus, Wojciech Luchowski
1 T. Mann, Magic Mountain, vol. I, transl. J. Kramsztyk, Czytelnik, Warsaw 1972, p. 333
2 Larys Lubowicki, Corpus Hominis, Gallery of Photography pf in Poznań, 28.04 - 19.06.2022; curated by Dominika Karalus, Wojciech Luchowski.
3 W. Benjamin, The work of art in the age of technical reproduction, translated by. J. Sikorski, in W. Benjamin, Angel of history, edited by H. Orłowski, Poznan Publishing House, Poznan 1996, p. 226.
4 B. Stiegler, Images of Photography. An album of photographic metaphors, transl. J. Czudec, Universitas, Krakow 2009, p. 177.
5 Ibid, p. 178.
6 L. Lubowicki, Corpus Hominis. Introduction, http://laryslubowicki.pl/corpus-hominis/ (accessed 20.04.2022).
dr. hab. Marianna Michalowska, prof. of UAM - heads the Department of Film and Audiovisual Culture Research at the Institute of Cultural Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. She is also a graduate of the University of Arts in Poznan. Her areas of research include contemporary transformations of photography and its presence in urban studies. She is the author of photographic productions and curator of exhibitions (including a series of exhibitions as part of the Biennale of Photography in Poznan from 2004-2016).