Driskel Vintage Photography
June 28- July 10, 2002
Opening Reception: Friday, June 28, 7-10 p.m.
The Driskel Vintage Photography Gallery at the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design in Provincetown, MA presents a collection of vintage anatomical radiographs and cyanotype photograms.
The radiographs (X-rays) are delicate vintage gelatin silver prints that now function as beautiful artworks. Ball-and-socket, inverse ball-and-socket, ellipsoid, hinge, saddle, and plane skeletal articulations were all examined by the French radiographers who made these images less than 40 years after the accidental discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Rontgen in 1895. One curious radiograph of a hand with an opaque ring, the aspect of its delicate tilt allowing us to see the full three-dimensionality of the ring, is quite similar to one of Rontgen’s early X-rays of his own wife’s ringed hand.
Looking for fractures and anomalies, these radiographers sometimes marked their images with arrows and other notations that recall the original medical purpose.
X-rays (and some other rays) are largely outside the range of normally visible white light, but some may be able to be recorded on specially prepared papers. It is curious that for at least a decade after Rontgen’s scientific discovery the prevailing belief was that proof had finally arrived of the existence of bodily auras and spiritual emanations. More mystical or superstitious than scientific, these subsequent studies moved quickly into fraud. An example of a popular photo-fraud is so-called “spirit photography,” popular at the end of the 19th century. A ghostly image of a dead person appears mysteriously in the background of a photographic portrait of a living subject.
The large-scale early 20th century vintage cyanotype photograms in this exhibit were made as contact prints from paper-thin slices of human cadaver torsos and heads (probably frozen). Full-scale negatives were produced from which contact blueprints were created on papers prepared with iron salts. Others of the huge and spectacular prints from this group have found their way into the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington, D. C.
The Schoolhouse Center is located at 494 Commercial Street in Provincetown's historic East End Gallery District. The Galleries are open daily from 11 and always by appointment. For more information please call Larry Collins at (508) 487.4800.
