Liz Orton - Every Body is an Archive

In contemporary medicine it is hard to overstate the extent to which imaging tools lead in a patient’s diagnosis. Often, it is the machine (the x-ray, the MRI, the CT and PET scan), not the doctor, that interprets the body. Such radiographic machinery may not ‘see’ in a human sense, but the data that they capture will be read and interpreted as any photograph would be. These images of our insides can become the starting point for any future clinical relationship, but it is only the parts of us that are not functioning as they should be that are scrutinised. It is a distorted echo of ourselves that is left behind after such examinations, that is placed on the lightbox and defined with a language many of us lack the capacity to speak.

Every Body Is An Archive is as much about the ethics of photography, a photobook about the power structures at play in the very act of looking – who gets to look, who is observed, and how the image functions – as it is about the medical gaze.

The visual construction of the medical body pervades Liz Orton’s photobook Every Body Is An Archive (2019, self-published). The result of Orton working with patients and healthcare professionals at University College Hospital London, it represents just one strand of a long-term research project. Text, staged and archival photographs and Orton’s own work with radiographic imaging software fill the pages. Taken together, this is a book that suggests that the body is constructed by images, but also that such constructions are vulnerable. Every Body Is An Archive is as much about the ethics of photography, a photobook about the power structures at play in the very act of looking – who gets to look, who is observed, and how the image functions – as it is about the medical gaze.

Orton is interested in the medical scan but moves away from the insides of the body, focusing instead on the processes and technologies that enable such images to be taken. The bundled hospital gown. A photograph of Manganese metal, the contrast agent used in MR imaging. Archival images from an old edition of Clark’s Positioning in Radiography, where ankles are held in place with pillows, where faces are bisected with lines to ensure the perfect angle. Orton’s own choreographed photographs, close crops of a pair of arms holding a different pair of legs, a woman reaching over to hold a man’s bare chest from behind, feel gestural rather than diagrammatic. Revealing the labour that goes into the creation of the medical image begins to unsettle their inherent authority. Orton argues that such representations are vulnerable, constructed as any other image is, and deserving of the same scrutiny.

Orton’s book can be read as an attempt to find an alternative language for the medical image that sits outside of the institution.

Orton’s book can be read as an attempt to find an alternative language for the medical image that sits outside of the institution. Text is well utilised here. The words that scatter the pages are taken from discussions with individuals who looked at their own medical images and described what they saw. Faintly visible in yellow, the text is a cacophony of different voices trying to give shape to the visual. Often, such descriptions lapse into metaphor; participants see a “hooked fish” or “some groovy kind of disco”. These words, cut and spliced from larger conversations, show the distance between the radiographic image and how we see ourselves. Further, how such images begin to move away from the body as soft, tactile, and lived in. How vision can come to dominate and flatten, until representation replaces flesh.

Designed by Valentina Abenavoli, Every Body Is An Archive resists the definitive, instead embracing multiplicity. There is no single voice, no single image that can be used to define. Different paper stocks are used throughout. Images inhabit the pages unevenly, here filling the page, there positioned in a corner, elsewhere squarely centred. Such stylistic choices undercuts the medical image as a site for knowledge creation and reveals their instability – Clark’s Positioning in Radiography doesn’t exist here as a referential tool, Orton’s staged images centre gesture over clinical clarity. By embracing multiplicity, and thus unsettling singularity of the medical image, this is a book that begins to speak to the power structures that create and fix the body from the outside.

In this vein, perhaps the most illuminating images are those Orton made with radiographic software. They are cast in shimmering silver against black paper. A deliberate misuse of the software that would usually reveal the insides here shows a body (or body part) that is hardened, sculptural, petrified. It’s a subtle hint at the ways in which such images create a universal digital body that is data driven, de-individualised. But misuse is also a way to consider the machine as a structural force. The act of looking is turned on itself, suggesting how the dominance of vision in the medical sphere can impact both how we are seen and, unfortunately, how we are treated.

While writing this review I picked up a short essay by the writer John Niven. In O Brother he describes trying to gain access to an image of his brother’s brain scan, a man who is in a coma and unlikely to wake up. “I don’t know if that would help you” the senior consultant says, “…would you even know what you’re looking at, Mr Niven?” A whole hierarchy of knowledge is revealed in this short exchange. When looking through Orton’s book, I’m struck by how she’s trying to visualise that hierarchy, and give a visual language to what’s being looked at beyond the immediacies of a medical condition. Every Body Is An Archive suggests how it feels to both be turned into image and to be unsure as to what that image is or could be. It’s interested in what exists alongside it and what’s left behind.