Body Images

When tasked with a project to look into the depiction of the human body in photography, I was immediately interested in calling attention to people's perceptions of their own body parts. I wanted to cause questions of perception mostly due to the work of the artist Cindy Sherman, whose photographs question gender roles by highlighting elements of common scenarios which are contrary to social norms. I decided on depicting hands because they are at once one of the most intimate and most used parts of the body, while also being commonly ignored in their detail. People are generally identified by their faces, but the hands contain just as much information about someone's character, if not more. This tied into my interest in our study of physiognomy, which seeks to determine one's personality from the appearance of their face. However, the documentation of hands is a rather more credible form of physiognomy than that of faces, for the same reason that more of a person's experiences are recorded in their hands and in how the person carries their hands.

To achieve these goals I chose to photograph the hands of a large number of college students. Rather than taking the series in a very rigid and structured physiognomical setting, I allowed the subjects to pose their own hands as they pleased. Although this degraded my desire to directly document all of the hands, it did make the images of the hands much more organic and familiar due to the presence of varied but familiar backgrounds, which calls greater attention to the use and perception of hands in daily life. This also provided me with the chance to photograph the variety of ways that people utilize their hands: for communication, to do work, and as accessories to an image. I also made sure not to include any of the subject's faces in the images, in order to keep the face from being a distraction from the hands.