Mysterious delicacies and ambiguous agents: Lennart nilsson in national geographic

Configurations

Volumn 6, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 373-393

  Jain, Sarah S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0011583549     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.1998.0027     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. See his cover feature photoessay "Drama of Life before Birth." This "strangely beautiful and scientifically unique color essay" is featured also in the editor's note, with a picture of Nilsson, who points out that what makes his photographs "scientifically valid" is the fact that they are taken "in their natural environment" (Life, 58:17 [April 1965]: 7). Nilsson had previously been featured in Life for his images of polar bears, African jungles, the film director Ingmar Bergman, and ants. His fetus images were featured again in a Life cover story in 1990:
2. see "The First Days of Creation," Life 13:10 (August 1990).
3. In 1980 Nilsson was the first recipient of the annual Hasselblad award, which has been awarded to such luminaries as Anselm Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Sebastio Salgado: see Hasselblad Awards, 1980-1995 (Stockholm: Hasselblad Centre, 1996). As this book points out, despite his international fame, Nilsson has gone virtually unnoticed in various recent histories of photography. Nilsson did the biophotography for the following publications:
4. David H. Ingvar, Stig Nordfeldt, and Rune Pettersson, Behold Man: A Photograph Journey Of Discovery Inside the Body, Irans. Ilona Munck (New York: Little, Brown, 1974), photography by Lennart Nilsson in collaboration with Jan Lindberg;
5. S. Lawrence, How Was I Bom? A Story in Pictures (New York: Delacorte Press, 1975);
6. Mirjam Furuhjelm, Axel IngelmanSundberg, and Claes Wirsen, A Child Is Bom: New Photographs of Life before Birth and Up-to-date Advice for Expectant Parents (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977; also a CD-I adaptation. Philips);
7. Hans Krook, Nature Magnified: Over One Hundred Extraordinary Photographs by One of the World's Greatest Photographers (London: Macdonald, 1984);
8. Sheila Kitzinger, Being Boni (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1986);
9. The Miracle of Life (New York: Swedish Television and WGBH Boston TV Recording, 1986), directors and producers Bo G. Erikson and Carl O. Lofman, written and produced by Bebe Nixon;
10. Kjell Lindquist and Stig Nordfelt, The Body Victorious: The Illustrated Story of Our Immune System and Other Defenses of the Human Body (New York: Delacorte Press, 1987), photography by Lennart Nilsson in collaboration with Jan Lindberg. In addition, between 1987 and 1989 Nilsson prepared six films and two books for the National Geographic Society, and a composite of his images is engraved on the back of the current 100-kroner bill.
11. See Joëlle Bentley, "Photographing the Miracle of Life: The Work of Lennart Nilsson," Technology Review 95:8 (1992): 58. Nilsson was well-known as a landscape photographer and portraitist before he started work on photographing the interiors of bodies.
12. A photograph of his taken in the Belgian Congo is included in Edward Steichen's Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955),
13. and the year before that he was featured in Gustaf Nasstrom, Sweden in Profiles: Photographs by Lennart Nilsson (Stockholm: Swedish Institute, 1954).
14. In 1964 he collaborated with Gostar Jagersten to produce Life in the Sea (New York: Basic Books, 1964).
15. Finding that electron micrographs were invoked in university lectures on immunology as visual evidence to clinch an argument, Martin collected the reactions of a number of people to several electron micrographs: they found landscapes, seascapes, puff pastry, plants, satellites, leeches, and much more in images very similar to the ones I examine here. As Martin notes, in popular culture the images lead to anything but closure. Her project is importantly different from mine in that I analyze the images as framed within a particular context, while she was showing individual photographs to viewers.
16. See Emily Martin, "Interpreting Electron Micrographs," in idem, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture-From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), pp. 167-182.
17. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, Irans. Steven Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), pp. 25-26.
18. See Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FeinaIeMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse (New York/London: Routledge, 1997).
19. C. D. B. Bryan, The National Geographic Society: One Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1987).
20. In this 500-page history the loading and burdening to which I refer is not necessarily a purposeful collusion, but a result of various discursive practices, institutional arrangements, systems of value, and semiotic mechanisms. In addition to Nilsson, there are the multiple layers of National Geographic editors and technicians as well as the limits to the form of the magazine and book, issues of finance, mandate, and so on, which all influence the final product. And, of course, there is the author of the book, who has collaged thousands of National Geographic stories and photographs. I use collage here in the literal sense, as theorized by Margorie Perloff, who writes that collage must be considered both as a juxtaposition of fragments and as an organizational system in which its signification is dependent on the juxtaposition of parts. Thus, each element in the collage has a dual function: it refers to an external reality, even as its compositional thrust undercuts the very referentiality it seems to assert.
21. See Margorie Perloff, The Futurist Movement: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 51.
22. 1 will be arguing in this paper that Nilsson's images are similarly framed within the taxonomy of collection, purporting to systematically account for the world at the same time that the form of the collection undercuts their very ability to do so. The resulting paraintentionality of effect is what makes the images in their ineluctable contexts fascinating actors in a spectacular and potently ideological economy. In this essay I use National Géographie to stand in for these complex relations and forces that have created the volume.
23. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 471. When I say "liberal" here, I mean to impute a tradition of politics that takes the individual to be central to human organization. A basic belief in progress, competition, and utilitarianism underpins the paradigm in which the individual is the basic unit of political analysis and the reason-for-being of social and political organization. Liberals believe that liberty is a private good secured by each individual acting alone, and that civil society and family are reflective of human nature. For an excellent critique of liberalism,
24. see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
25. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 21.
26. Philip Pauly, "The World and All That Is in It: The National Geographic Society, 1888-1918," American Quarterly 4 (Fall 1979): 530.
27. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 455.
28. The epigraph from the outer-space chapter reads: "There is no way back into the past: the choice, as [H. G.] Wells once said, is the Universe-or nothing.... The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one, but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to a close. Humanity will have turned its back upon the still untrodden heights and will be descending again the long slope that stretches, across a thousand million years of time, down the shores of the primeval sea" (Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 355, quoting from Carl Sagan in his National Geographic article "Mars: A New World to Explore" [December 1967]). Outer space has been a major feature of National Geographic, the subject of articles in October 1934, May 1959, September 1961, June 1962, October 1966, December 1967, February 1969, May 1969 (2), December 1969, January 1980, July 1981, and June 1985.
29. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 457. In National Geographic"TV special "Man: The Incredible Machine" (1975) there is an easy and continuous slippage between the discourses of science and literature; the narrative resorts to aesthetic explanation when rationale fails.
30. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 456 (image) and p. 457 (explanatory information). While Fairchild fiddles with the camera in the foreground, the unnamed wife, rendered small by the perspective, is crouched in the back upper corner of the image watching him.
31. One Hundred Years Ibid., p. 457.
32. One Hundred Years Ibid., pp. 458-459.
33. One Hundred Years Ibid., p. 459.
34. The Incredible Machine (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1986).
35. Bryan, One Hundred Years, pp. 457-459. Five out of the nine full-page images are photomicrographs (including the double-page title spread), and of those at least three are Nilsson's. The other images include an insect magnified eighty times; an MRI scan image; a particle-track pyrotechnics detector on a screen at the CERN laboratory; and a close-up image of a child undergoing treatment.
36. One Hundred Years Ibid., p. 466.
37. One Hundred Years Ibid.
38. One Hundred Years Ibid., p. 471.
39. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
40. or Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Irans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1974, 1984).
41. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York/London: Routledge, 1992), p. 202.
42. Although Nilsson himself is featured in The Incredible Machine book, he is mentioned only in the photo credits at the back of the Bryan volume.
43. Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 4.
44. Pratt, Imperial Eyes (above, n. 23), pp. 201-208. Other authors suggest similar colonial tropes of visuality-for example, Haraway's "land ho," or the various commentaries of Baudelaire's flaneur figure. For an interesting analysis of medical technologies used in the discourses and practices of endometriosis,
45. see Ella Shohat, "'Lasers for Ladies': Endo Discourse and the Inscriptions of Science (The Realization of Endometriosis as a Real Disease)," Camera Obscura 29 (1992): 56-89.
46. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 204 (emphasis added).
47. Imperial Eyes Ibid., pp. 204-205.
48. For more on discovery, evidence, and visual display, see Bruno Lautour's essay "Drawing Things Together," in which he argues that the objects of evidence with which the explorer returns have to be "mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another" (in Representations in Scientific Practice, ed. Steve Woolgar and Michael Lynch ([Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991], p. 26).
49. 1 am not arguing here that "inner space" is immutable (quite the opposite), but that the photographs are presented as if they were scientific documents, and that the media of inner-space exploration-the science and the technology of the microscope-are constructed as immutable.
50. Edward Weston, "Techniques of Photographic Art," quoted in Hollis Frampton, "Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place," October 5 (Summer 1978): 64.
51. Lucy R. Lippard, "Introduction," in Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans, ed. idem (New York: New Press, 1992), p. 43.
52. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
53. Haraway, Modest_Witness (above, n. 5), pp. 23-45.
54. The fact that Fairchild's wife is left nameless in the second image of the chapter is therefore no accident: the projects of science and exploration have been constituted by her exclusion as woman and as technician. As David Noble argues, the "cult of science has not simply excluded women, it has been denned in defiance of women and their absence"
55. (A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992],
56. p. xiv; quoted in Haraway, Modest_Witness, p. 29). Similarly, geographic exploration has been constitutive of a masculinity based on the exclusion of women and in opposition to qualities ineluctably feminized: domesticity, nurturance, daintiness. I shall be arguing that the National Geographic construction of inner-space images coincides with these readings of science and exploration. I also hypothesize that in the absence of a virtuous embodied observer, technology and progress emerge as masculinized heroes that tell the story of bearing witness, and that additionally constitute the National Geographic reader as modest witness.
57. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 151-165.
58. Bloom, Gender on Ice (above, n. 25), p. 89, quoting a National Geographic special film on Africa.
59. 1 use "cultural-material" here as a way to juggle both the cultural inscriptions on material and the specificity of materials.
60. The only "close-up" image-that is, an image that looks closely at the exterior of a body-is that of an ant. When I think of close-up images of the body I think of surgical images, or the body fragments that the surrealists used as illustrations. These images could not be used to stand in for all bodies in the way that inner-space images can, or in the way that an ant can stand in for all ants.
61. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 139.
62. Bryan, One Hundred Years (above, n. 6), p. 471.
63. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky argues that the notion of the fetus as an autonomous atomized space-explorer infuses popular culture: the image of the astronaut "has not supplanted the one of the fetus as a tiny, helpless, suffering creature but rather merged with it" ("Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction," Feminist Studies 13:2 [1987]: 271).
64. These images are so ineluctably intertwined with the pro-life side of the abortion debate that when I went to the Santa Cruz public library to pick up a book for this paper I found a collection of similar embryo and fetus images that stood alone, without explanation, as a self-explanatory pro-life exhibit.
65. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 374.
66. This "most cherished of geographical prizes" (p. 374) was not only to have reached the Pole, but to have been the first white male to do so. Robert Peary, who controversially laid claim to this prize, led an expedition that was fraught with personal and scientific problems; the National Geographic had a quite a task to maintain his stakes after funding the expedition.
67. See Bloom, Gender on Ice (above, n. 25).
68. For example, Mary Louis Pratt writes on the history of travel literature: "The (lettered, male, European) eye that held the system could familiarize ('naturalize') new sites/sights immediately upon contact, by incorporating them into the language of the system" (Imperial Eyes [above, n. 23], p. 31).
69. Donna Haraway, "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse," in idem. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York/London: Routledge, 1989), p. 22.
70. War is a common theme in histories of the body and health. The inner-space chapter is pockmarked with quotes such as "The instruments that made surveillance of these wars within us possible" (Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 466; italics his).
71. See also Emily Martin, "The Body at War: Media Views of the Immune System," in Flexible Bodies (above, n. 3), pp. 49-63;
72. Marita Sturkin, "Bodies of Commemoration: The Immune System and HIV," in idem, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkely/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 220-254. These authors discuss war imagery in popular media depictions of inner space.
73. On the metaphors of the body as machine through this century, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1992).
74. Stewart, On Longing (above, n. 36), p. 54.
75. Bryan, One Hundred Years, p. 459.
76. See Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).
77. See Edward Dimenberg, "The Will to Motorization: Cinema, Highways, and Modernity," October 73 (Summer 1995): 90-137.
78. See also Jeffrey Schnapp, "Crash" (forthcoming, on file with author), which examines the fantasies of speed, danger, and individualism that have imbued transportation technologies from cabriolets to cars.
79. Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Man'elous Possessions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 20.
80. By the term affect I want to suggest the psychoanalytic usage of the "expression or instigation of a general mood," a "psychical energy attached to an idea or group of ideas"; see Jean LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973). In a related concept, David Nye writes of the liminal space as one created by corporations by their use of technology: "By simulating magic,... corporations pushed the audience over the line from ordinary reality toward a simulated dream world in which everything seemed possible. At the same time, the magical presentation of science made it seem to have a life of its own" (
81. David Nye, The American Technological Sublime [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994], p. 216).
82. There are many interesting and important accounts of the technological sublime. I limit my discussion here to Nye's account.
83. Edmund Burke, Pliilosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756),
84. quoted in Nye, Technological Sublime, p. 9.
85. Nye, Technological Sublime, pp. 15-16.
86. Technological Sublime Ibid., p. 40.
87. Technological Sublime Ibid., p. 35.
88. Technological Sublime Ibid., p. 43.
89. Just as women could not be modest witnesses in endeavors of science, neither were women to have a relationship to the sublime. Kant insisted that women were, if not incapable, certainly reproachable for attempting to experience the sublime. Tamer emotions, such as beauty, were the province of women and the effeminate. Nye writes: "Works of the technological sublime were decidedly male creations" (Technological Sublime, pp. 30-33). Furthermore, he argues that the contemplation of the sublime was thought to be best experienced without the company of women, who were unable to fully appreciate it.