Skulls featured in the "Perfect Vessels" exhibit. Images courtesy of David Orr
Get the VICE App on iOS and Android.
You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their skull—their age, sex, race, and health can all be ascertained by examining the 22 bones that cradle the brain. No two skulls are identical. Like faces and personalities, each one is unique, preserving the essence of someone even after they've died.
David Orr, a photographer based in Los Angeles, sees these individual differences in skulls as art. For his latest exhibit, currently on view at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, he photographed 22 skulls from the museum's Hyrtl collection—over 100 skulls collected by Viennese anatomist Joseph Hyrtl, who used them to counter claims that you could determine someone's intelligence by their cranial features. Orr's exhibit pairs the original skulls—some of them disfigured or marred by disease—with black and white photographs that have been vertically-halved and combined with their mirror image. The end result explores our cultural ideal of perfect symmetry, in life and in death.
I spoke to Orr about his exhibit and what we can learn about the living by looking at the skulls of the dead.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
"Perfect Vessels" on exhibit. Photo courtesy of The Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
VICE: The exhibit is called Perfect Vessels. What does that mean?
David Orr: The significance of "perfect" as a modifier is that each of these skulls is mirrored. I photographed them facing the camera and I took one half and I mirrored it. I've often worked with symmetry and repeating forms, and I was always fascinated by the way that it resolves them. No matter how odd a shape is, if you repeat it, it becomes considered. But it also leads to something more concrete as well, which is that people consider faces that are more symmetrical to be more attractive. There is a study about this called "Symmetry and Human Facial Attractiveness." That love of symmetry got a hold of them back in the day. So it's kind of interesting to me that now, someone will know the name "Milan Joanovits." Whereas in the past, the way he lived his life and the way he ended up and what happened to him would normally not have led to people knowing his name.
Perfect Vessels runs through January 5, 2017 at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia.
Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.
from VICE http://ift.tt/2bwD094
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment