Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery Presents Photos from the Mütter Museum

UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery presents “Extraordinary Bodies: Photographs from the Mütter Museum,” on display from January 30 through March 12, 2006.
Photographers and medicine are no strangers. The visual representation of anatomy and pathology as viewed by the camera dates back to the advent of the daguerreotype, and early pathology was used by doctors and scientists to create anatomical atlases as well as document disease and trauma. Photographs also allowed physicians to keep exact visual records of cases long after patients died.
The historical bond between photographers and medicine carries forward to the present day with “Extraordinary Bodies: Photographs from the Mütter Museum,” the culmination of more than a decade of work that includes contemporary photography by Shelby Lee Adams, Max Aguilera-Hellweg, Gwen Akin & Allan Ludwig, Candace diCarlo, Dale Gunnoe, Steven Katzman, Mark Kessell, Scott Lindgren, Olivia Parker, Rosamond Purcell, Richard Ross, Ariel Ruiz i Altaba, Harvey Stein, Arne Svenson, William Wegman and Joel-Peter Witkin. For some of these photographers, the medical manipulation of the body — an act that amounts to the isolation of the part from the whole — becomes a visual metaphor for the human condition. Others experiment with the juxtaposition of real or artificial body parts and the public and private spaces of the Museum itself.
“Extraordinary Bodies: Photographs from the Mütter Museum” presents these works by current photographers alongside powerful images from the Mütter Museum’s renowned historical photography collection. The images in the exhibition extend the boundaries of traditional photographic subject matter, finding beauty not in conventional forms, but in internal marvels and in the enigma of those whose bodies — deformed, broken, and disfigured — have suffered physical abnormality, trauma or destructive disease.
The Mütter Museum, one of the last medical museums from the nineteenth century, comprises a sublime anatomical and pathological collection that originated with Thomas Dent Mütter, a professor of surgery who collected unique specimens and models for teaching purposes. Under the care of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, to which Mütter offered his collection in 1856, the Mütter Museum has grown and survived where most others did not; today a new audience has emerged to appreciate its collections.
“Extraordinary Bodies: Photographs from the Mütter Museum” offers a rare opportunity for people who have not experienced the medical student’s rite of passage and initiation into the singular mysteries of the profession to encounter powerful, inspiring and enthralling images of nature’s challenges to human life.
The publication Mütter Museum (Blast Books, 2002) by Gretchen Worden, the late director of the Mütter Museum, accompanies the exhibition and will be available for sale.
On Tuesday, February 21 at 4:30 pm, the Library Gallery will host a lecture by Mark Alice Durant, professor of photography in the Department of Visual Arts at UMBC, who will discuss the photographers in the show, as well as other photographers whose work illustrates the continued fascination of the contemporary artist with the aesthetics of the human form. A reception will follow the lecture.
For more information, visit http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/gallery/ or call (410) 455-2270.
Photo credit: Rosamond Purcell, Human Head Prepared by Batson, 2000, Iris print