Have You Looked At Your Body Lately?

Photographer Loredana Denicola is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From her project ‘Scanning My Body‘. To see Loredana’s body of work click on any image.

Artist: E Hellis

Photographer: Loredana Denicola

This profanation of every inch and detail of her body with a scanner make me think of how much we struggle with our Identity and how often in everyday life we forget what extraordinary machine our body is and how miraculous life is itself.

“The body has to be loved, you have to be a great friend to it. It is your home.”

A curious focus on the ‘cage’ of flesh before exploring the inside: our blood, our liquids, our brain, our DNA, our heart and the act of breathing.

The body has to be loved, you have to be a great friend to it. It is your home. You have to remember that it is in your service continuously, day in, day out: digesting, changing your food into blood, taking out the dead cells of the body, bringing new oxygen into the body. But we forget about it.

Scanning my body is a live performance held at Trispace, a small gallery in London focused on the work of young artists.

There, I met E Hellis, a young artist busy at scanning her own body with a simple scanner. I immediately perceived her obsessive love for herself. The process was quite fascinating, a sort of narcissistic act of love for her own body.

The work is a part of Body Camera, a series of performances in which she employs an image capturing device to capture images of her own body, whether that be a scanner, endoscope, microscope, bolex camera, gopro or an Iphone, with a predilection for microscopic details.

Initially she was inspired by the TSA’s full body scanner controversy over the use of Advanced Imaging Technologies machines in airports, sometimes referred to as “naked scanners”.

Many people were naturally horrified at the thought that the technicians/monitors who used the body scanners as part of airport security protocol had access/were perverting over images of their flesh. Something which presents the body as cold/medical/clinical could still be fetishized.