hand plays (shadow play series)

 

Shadow play series (14 pictures). An X-ray practice is somewhat similar to a cave where a form turns into a shadow on a wall. All radiologists experience this, because radiography proceeds like a shadow play, that is to say like a projection : indeed the hand, that acts as a barrier to the rays, will leave an imprint on a numerique plate, which is determined by the density of its constituents, exactly like a photogram. Thus, X-ray radiography has much more to do with photography and its history than we could have imagined.
So I asked puppeteers and shadow-makers to replay the childish bestiary of shadow puppets, to experience one more time the blurred line between light and X-rays (which is the foundation of Röntgen’s discovery).
In the end, this imagery of the “me”, which usually only targets a “patient”, becomes an image of the “us”, because it refers to and even finds some poetry. According to the people who posed for these images, there is something sovereign about mimicking a wolf or a deer with the bones of one’s hands because medical X-rays only present a “diminished” reality of ourselves (and not an “augmented reality”), since they evacuate our skin, our history, our affect…
Eventually, this series gives the viewer an active role as he is supposed to decipher the picture (which is therefore not devised for specialists) and he can train to recognize the animal mimicked by the hands.

 

 

 

 

 
L’usage de la radiographie sur le corps humain à des fins non médicales est interdit, article L1333-11 du code de santé publique, mention ASN