My Self as My Body

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About My Self as My Body

Please feel free to add your "body" photo to this group!

This is an open space for people to contribute images that relate in any way to what it means to have a physical body. A place to compare and contrast our physical selves to our conceptual selves.

Ideas can come from anything that forms an interest to you regarding the conceptual body or your own physical body. Examples of this could be (self)portraiture, medical photographs, dissection prints you find in a museum, people you see walking on the street, tools as an extension of the body, clothing, or what ever is under the sun that, for you, relates to 'the body'.


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Background as to why I started this flickr group-

Unedited excerpt of the beginning of my thesis for my MA in Museum Studies (please forgive this work in progress unedited stream of consciousness):

Science is a method in which we test and organize our knowledge to make the natural world understandable. The Latin scientia purely means ‘knowledge’ and what we know as science today has also since classical antiquity been closely linked to philosophy, the study of concepts to discover such knowledge. The two major fields of science are Social sciences studying human behavior, and natural sciences that study natural phenomena. Humans have developed science as a method to study life and what it means to be in a world that is not understood. Humans developed science to study this world using methodology which analyzes the material, space and time surrounding our very being. In the end, a person’s very being is wrapped up inside our physical selves- our body. Hence, science is represented in Museums by an accumulation of devices that we have made to reach out beyond our bodies to prod into the mysteries of the world that we stand in.

In this paper I will take into account the human body as the closest thing to a person which henceforth goes unnoticed so that we end up forgetting its value and its direct relation to everything we try to analyze, understand or produce within our existence in the world. In this paper I will take this into account and show how museums can represent the aloofness of the human body, through objects and designed exhibits, to methodically study life and bring the importance of understanding our own bodies back to us through a awareness of our physical selves.

Museums are a science within themselves because they hold a specific morphological relationship of displaying ourselves as humanity back to us in a reflection of objects that our ancestors, who also had bodies, have produced. This is a method that can be considered scientific due to its study of humanity. Even a museological definition of humanity means a community, a culture, a ‘we’- which all have the underline tone of an ‘us’ which is divided into many plural ‘myself’s’. Myself can thus be broken down further into a self as an individual which is made up of conceptual thought and a physical body. A self makes what is produced on the outside of our bodies such as the objects shown in a museum. What is not represented very often in museums is the insides of our selves- our bodies. Is the reason that our bodies become invisible to us because they are the closest proximity we can possibly be to nature? The concept of what our bodies are made up of can be a fragile topic, just as we ourselves are in a fragile state of existing in the external world. Does this mean that it is an ethical decision that Museums step away from displaying the body? Museum display and invisibly representation of our physical bodies through tangible objects that humanity has produced throughout observed history. This paper is an argument that all Museums are constructed by undertones of an explanation as to what it means to be human and that everything we consist of as humanity stems from within our physical selves. Our bodies.


This Body Flickr group was also inspired by Danny Birchall who created a group for the The Medical London flickr pool as an extension of Wellcome Collection’s Medical London project.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mybody/