The Illuminated Body: Excerpts from an Atlas of Illness and Injury

Using the metaphor of a body atlas, this paper charts an exploration of the sense of touch. Although photography is considered to be a visual art, The Illuminated Body demonstrates the ways in which the sense of touch underlies an embodied point of view. Monochromatic self-portraits layered and embossed with enigmatic healing talismans lend a physical and emotional tactility to the photographic project. The relationship of touch to visible and invisible pains and the materialization of memory on the skin reveal a reciprocality between self and other, inside and out. Buddhist philosophy considers mind to be a sixth sense and regards touch as fundamental to the process of perception. Phenomenology reflects the importance of intentionality in the first person point of view and the unavoidability of a reciprocal relationship with the world; as the world touches us through our sense perceptions, so do we touch the world. A synthesis of the two philosophies is possible only by acknowledging the uniqueness of an incarnate perspective, firmly rooted in the flesh. Skin can be understood as receptacle for memory, not only in the stories of scars, but also in the inevitable co-mingling of sensation and memories. A number of photographic artists including Geneviève Cadieux, Annette Messager and Myra Greene work with fragmented body parts and skin, weaving fiction, history and metaphor into moving stories of the flesh. The Illuminated Body draws on a constellation of ideas in these and other artists' works to contextualize and search for resonance in photographic self-portraiture. Using illness and injury as a points of departure, The Illuminated Body uses of discourses of skin and touch to elucidate the commonalities of human experience that are hidden within personal narrative and associative memory.