Credit: SAMMLUNG DIETMAR SIEGERT

In the mid-nineteenth century, Guillaume Duchenne, who described the form of muscular dystrophy that bears his name, documented in detail all the muscles of the human face and the facial expressions that they could convey.

Fear, joy, horror, disdain and disgust — Duchenne could reproduce any expression of emotion by direct electrical stimulation of the appropriate group of muscles. In doing so, and in recording his experiments photographically, he caused a sensation. At the time, our ability to convey subtle emotions on our faces was considered a divine manifestation of the inner consciousness that separated us from the beasts — not merely a matter of simple physiology.

An introverted man and an unconventional scientist, Duchenne was not shy of challenging the world. Using this series of facial shots, he argued that the ancient Greeks often got it wrong. The facial expressions on their sculptures did not always accurately reflect the anatomy of the emotions that the artists intended to convey, he claimed.

Duchenne was one of the first scientists to use the new technology of photography as part of the scientific process. The image shown here is included in the exhibition “Photography and Painting in the Nineteenth Century”, which runs until 18 July at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich, Germany.

The extensive exhibition describes how painters were influenced by the new way of seeing, and how scientists, engineers and architects used photography as a means of record-keeping — which also allowed them to see their own worlds differently. It emphasizes the unexpected dialogue between science and art, which were both confronted with this revolutionary new tool at the same time.

→ http://www.hypokunsthalle.de/