Paul Bryant's Reviews > THE BODY

Everyone reading this has got one, unless you suspect you might be a brain in a vat being programmed with fake sensory inputs. It’s an intriguing theory but it won’t help at all when you’re pulled over for speeding. “I’m just a brain in a vat, officer”.

So that thing you have there draped round your soul, yes, your very body – did you know that it’s like an explosive device waiting to go off at the slightest movement? It’s so offensive! Depending on the context.

For instance, on p155 we read:

Jock Sturges has been photographing the same nudist families in France year after year, watching the children grow into young adults. Sally Mann photographs her own children negotiating the turbulent waters of childhood.

This book was published in 1994 and in the last 24 years we have had such a tsunami of revelations about the prevalence of paedophilia that the very young nudes in these two photographers’ works are now alarming and very unsettling. (But still on sale at Amazon.)

How’s this for a story about the offensive qualities of the human form. A modest form of swimwear was created for Muslim women which got called the burkini – actually it’s nothing to do with the burka as it does not cover the face, but it covers everything else.



The burka had already been banned in France as you will know. But then the burkini was banned by various French resorts. What could possibly be the problem? The Independent newspaper explained:

The first city to announce the prohibition was Cannes, where mayor David Lisnard said he wanted to prohibit “beachwear ostentatiously showing a religious affiliation while France and places of religious significance are the target of terror attacks” to avoid “trouble to public order”.

So then you had the crazy sight of French policemen on the beach ordering Muslim women wearing the burkini to expose more of their bodies or face the judicial consequences. “You’re offending public decency by wearing too many clothes!”

This fits right into the chapter of this remarkable book called “Politic” – “the body as a site of contested meaning and value”. Boy, you can say that again.

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So this book is stuffed full of 366 photos – “35 in colour, 331 in duotone” (yes, black & white) – of the human body in its many phases and attitudes, from the very gruesome

Felice Beato 1865 – Crucifixion of the Male Servant Sokichi who Killed the Son of his Boss and was Therefore Crucified. He Was 25 Years Old

to surrealistic fun in the 1930s and all the way to the pinnacle of straight and gay male and female beauty. It’s also stuffed with rather turgid and waffly prose consisting of statements of the obvious and statements of the indefinably abstruse with very little in between.

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One of the most interesting chapters is called “Estrangement”, dealing with imperfect, disfigured, disabled, rejected, sick and dead human bodies. So here we have the bound Chinese foot, the Fijian cannibals with a fresh corpse, the hermaphrodite, elephantiasis due to scarlet fever, and a selecting of grossly deformed foetuses in big jars (always a crowd-pleaser). And let’s not forget

A Filipino Freak Of Seven Or Eight Years Old Having An Extra Pair Of Legs Protruding From The Pelvis, C 1900

We are then informed that

in the 19th century there was a brisk trade in such photographs of 'the other' : the circus freak, the bearded lady, Siamese twins, and so forth were popular subjects to be collected and traded

So all those sites on the internet specialising in the gross and the grotesque have a venerable pedigree.

A book like this demonstrates how our notions of what is decent and what is indecent mutate quite confusingly as the decades roll on by. I now think that the Victorian collectors of pornography would not be shocked by modern porn; instead they would be delighted at the quality of the images. We 21st century people, however, might well be shocked at some Victorian practices :

Dead babies were another popular subject. Although to our thinking there is something of the macabre in this practice, people in the 19th century seemed to find much solace in it, as they did also in the so-called spirit photograph, a portrait of the widow or widower with an image of the dearly departed (manufactured by double exposure) hovering reassuringly over the shoulder.

(If you’re interested, just google “Victorian babies in coffins”)

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In 2016 Lucy Martin became a weather presenter on the BBC – here she is



I’m used to her now but at first she kind of shocked me. Okay, not kind of, she did shock me! I’m still trying to work out why.