C'est Du Trois Tous les Trois 

Photography, lambda print  

 Format 75 x 92 cm 

  2014  

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In the medical field, tomography is a technique designed to model and visualize certain functionalities of the body using measurements provided by sensors. (MRI, scanner, electroencephalography, microphone, etc.).

 

The title of the Dorothée Elisa Baumann series, composed of eight photographs, refers to a common expression in the medical field that designates the standard process of tomography where "the body is cut into three-millimeter segments every three millimetres".

 

Dominated by a clinical white, partial views of the laboratories are structured by the lines formed by sophisticated instruments and their numerous wiring. A studied aesthetics confers a distant character to the images, exacerbated by the virtual absence of a human being. Some photographs contain recording data: the cameras, caught in their own traps, are also objects of analysis (as is the case with the photographic image). The importance of medical imaging lies first and foremost in the fact that an image is a concentrate of information that is much more effective than a text or a verbal explanation.

In this refined atmosphere, where legibility is sometimes put to the test, the machines imposed themselves definitively. They seem to interfere between the doctor and the patient or cobaye. The only representation of being alive, an open eye under an electrode cap is, like other machines, connected to countless cables. In this scientific process, the fragmented body is reduced to a quantifiable substance. By substituting him with scientific devices.

Baumann wonders what has become of his "symbolic dimension". The photographer takes an ambiguous look at these places of research of the human body, both questioning their future development and fascinated by their efficacity and precision. The resulting images document a current theme: the development of visualization of the body and its ethical problematic.

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Text by Catherine Kohler, art historian and curator Journées photographiques de Bienne, 2007