Shocking expressions

Every once in awhile I stumble across something so strange, so wickedly bizarre that it freaks me out.

Yesterday morning I went to a few garage sales. At one of them I picked up a book called "Body", which is basically a collection of artistic photographs depicting several aspects of the human body.

In addition to the majority of the book, which is pretty much what you'd expect from a book of that name, there was a also a lot of weird stuff, lots of carnival freak show oddities and bodily deformities, a very disturbing photo of a young man who was crucified for killing the son of his boss.

That one WAS really disturbing, but the one that I thought was the strangest was in a chapter called "Probes: the realm of scientific exploration". It came from a set called "mecanisme de la physionomie humaine au analyse electro-physiologique de l'expression des passions", which presented a technique used by Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne in which facial expressions were induced by the application of electrical current to specific muscles. His goal was "to create a universally valid facial vocabulary", and he saw his findings as "invaluable to artists". *

What that means is that there are facial muscles that control all the expressions of emotion, and that they can be manipulated by electricity. A smile, induced by such means, is your TRUE smile, unaffected by any psychological agents which may factor into how you smile in public or even in private. This kind of smile is produced purely from the stimulation of the corresponding muscles, and the same goes for expressions associated with each emotion, such as fear, pleasure, bliss, etc.

That's a very unscientific, incomplete and likely error-filled condensation, but it's about as firm a grasp as I have on the subject. The circumstances of the photographs are indeed extraordinary, but it's the images themselves that seem deranged and eccentric.

I tried to find the same photograph used in "Body", which is of a young girl undergoimg the proceedure. In one of the plates she looks as if she's absolutely enraptured in some kind of mystical vision. Her eyes are rolled up in their sockets and even though she appears to be in a state of bliss, it still looks spooky and extremely fucked up (pardon my French).

Still, the photos I DID find are comparable, as you can see.



* "Body" by William A. Ewing (1994, Chronicle Books, pages 17 & 109)