Mark Kessell: Perfect Specimens

Last Rites Gallery, Manhattan, New York. 17 August–21 September.

What is Perfect Specimens?

It's a photographic life cycle of Homo sapiens. I tried to make images that anyone could recognize as distinctly human, showing conception, fetal development, birth, senescence and death. I want the photographs to raise questions about what it means, from a biological perspective, to be human.

Can you tell me about the fetal specimens?

There is a bizarre little human skeleton from around 1890, with enlarged eye sockets and no brain. The way it is mounted in a bottle, grinning upwards and perched on a little spike, seems to mock the tragedy for baby and mother. There is also a perfectly normal four-month-old fetus that is uncurled and standing upright and looks like a little alien. You can see the blood vessels under its translucent skin; the top of the skull has not yet fused. In another bottle there are tiny identical triplets, spontaneously aborted. These little guys once shared the same blood, but now they are forever alone.

Perpetual Disunity, a photo by Mark Kessell from his Perfect Specimens series. Credit: MARK KESSELL

How do you capture birth and death?

For birth, you find a brave woman with a generous partner, and as the baby comes out you stand between her legs with a camera. It's unforgettable and inspiring, but also disturbing as that huge head emerges through such a small aperture. For death, I get permission from relatives to document the final moments of their loved one. One photo shows the lips of a woman who has spoken her last words. Many avoid the subject, but death is a biological process, so why pretend?

What part does your medical training play?

I didn't take pictures until I was 39, when, on a road trip around Australia, my girlfriend handed me a disposable plastic camera. Within a year, I'd given up medicine and was attending art school in Manhattan. At first, I imagined shooting remote landscapes for National Geographic, but then I thought, 'Why fight my past?' I thought back to Egbert, the cadaver I dissected in medical school. He was sliced lengthwise so you could see the brain inside the skull. How vulnerable this source of our humanness seemed. And when we had to dissect a human arm, I was awestruck by the perfection of the hand, built with a sophistication far beyond technological ingenuity.

Are you questioning whether we are unique?

Most behaviours that were considered uniquely human until Darwin's time exist in other species. Crows have a sense of play, form social alliances and consider the future in their behaviour. In my series Unmet Friends, I explore our capacity to understand other creatures by showing primates, birds and reptiles in poses that appear to express human emotions. In Specimen Box, a thousand photos of animal specimens are pinned to the walls, floor and ceiling of a small room. Everything in the room is dead except for the human observers, whose curious faces are captured by hidden cameras.

What other subjects have you covered?

Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY JIM SPENCER BASED ON PHOTO BY MARK KESSELL

For Florilegium, I photographed surgical instruments, such as facelift forceps and urethral dilators, to make them look alive. These are the most menacing of my images. (One was used as the poster for a 2005 horror movie, Hostel, which I am not brave enough to see.) I'm not sure I realized how disturbing they were while shooting. These instruments are designed to rend human flesh and alter the body that largely defines our identity.

Does your work overturn assumptions?

I want people to examine their assumptions the way a scientist does. So in every series there is something that isn't what it seems. Many viewers perceive the instruments in Florilegium as botanical specimens. In Unmet Friends, animal faces may be misconstrued as human and vice versa. In Perfect Specimens, it can be hard to tell dead bodies from living ones. I want people to ask, 'Why is the artist showing me this?'

Why use the daguerreotype process?

It's an incredibly beautiful process, but very hard to control. The result depends on how the silver plate is polished, and on the intensity of the chemicals and light. Areas of overexposure turn an exquisite shade of blue. As a doctor, I was taught to control and standardize. But a daguerreotype can't be precisely replicated. Because it is a pure silver plate, it is also a mirror. You'll see your own face reflected. I'll see mine.