Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine: Scientific Looking, Looking at Science

Visual Culture is a term that has come to denote a wide range of forms, such as art, popular film, and visual data from sciences, law and medicine. Science and looking at science doesn’t occur in an environment isolated from cultural shaping and meaning. It is necessary to view scientific images while taking into account their social contexts and the advertising, art, law, and popular culture of the time period. In other words, “science and culture are always mutually engaged.”

Photography, originating in the early 19th century, became crucial in the fields of science and medicine as imaging methods became more complex and widespread and more incorporated into scientific and medical practices. Even though visual pictures and photographs are usually seen as being objective images, cameras are banned as means of documentation during the proceedings in courts in the U.S..

In medicine and science, there has been an obsession with “seeing the unseen.” People want to be able to see things that are viewed as secret or hidden. It’s human nature to be curious. Therefore, medical imaging techniques fuel human curiosity and inquisitiveness.

Artists have been preoccupied with the topic and representation of the human body for centuries. This was especially true during the Renaissance, when art and science combined on a regular basis. Leonardo da Vinci is famously known for his artistic representations of the anatomy of the human body. He was known to have performed more than 30 dissections during his life, and one of his most famous images, Vitruvian Man, is an anatomical representation of the human body.

An interesting topic in the chapter, anatomy theaters were popular from the 16th century onward. The anatomy theater of Leiden in the Netherlands (built in 1596) was a prominent site for public dissections. It seems like a very strange thing to us; however, the basic idea is present in our culture today—television shows such as Nip/Tuck and medical shows such as House and ER are immensely popular and regularly feature scenes of surgery and dissection.

Currently, the Body Worlds exhibits are popular and are directed by Gunther von Hagens. This exhibit has been discussed on the news, featured on magazine covers, and exhibited in cities around the U.S. and the world for years, followed by much interest and fascination. The bodies in this exhibit undergo a process called “plastination” and are posed and put on display with the layers of flesh pulled back to reveal organs, nerves, blood vessels, and muscle tissue. There have been some obvious controversies surrounding this exhibit, notably the gender discrepancies between the poses of male and female figures and the transgression of the boundary lines between real and fake, human and posthuman, organic and synthetic, and authentic and copy. This exhibit bridges art, science, and entertainment in a somewhat disturbing way.

The camera created the tendency for people to use photography as an objective recording device used to document and classify residents of various institutions—hospitals, asylums, etc. This led to the classification of medicine and the tendency to document and typify humanity. The practice of phrenology uses the drawing and photographs of bodies to catalogue and classify them, as well as to set a standard of “normal.” Phrenology was especially practiced on skulls and was thought to show a visual link between skull shape and temperament, moral capacity, health, and intelligence. Also, photographic categorization was used to establish criminality as a trait which could be linked to physical characteristics like a “low forehead” or “beady” eyes. This is evidenced today when people say things like “he just had a strange look about him” or “he looks like the kind of person would would do—“ of criminals and people in mug shots. In fact, Alphonse Bertillon’s photographs of his subjects’ profiles evolved into the modern day mug shot.

The Human Genome Project is another example of our obsession and desire to have visual “mappings” of the body, even on microscopic and molecular levels. Having a digital map of the genome would produce something easily decipherable, understandable, and containable—thus demystifying the human body in a way that we find somewhat comforting and satisfying.

The idea of a cyborg is another example of how humanity is seen as becoming meshed with technology and machinery. A cybord is something that is part technology and part organism, such as a bionic human. This is also a cultural phenomenon, captured by Hollywood in such films as the Terminator and such TV shows as Battlestar Gallactica.


Once again, science is not created in a vacuum or a world deprived of culture; rather, it is very much shaped by the culture in which it develops. Scientific images also contain cultural meanings that “govern not only how they are produced and for what purpose but also how they are interpreted and gain cultural value.”