With war photographs confronting us daily, do we need an exhibition to remind us of the body's vulnerability? But the havoc caused by war is only one aspect of it. There is disease, domestic violence, environmental pollution, the enfeeblement of old age, starvation, drug addiction and more -- much more. It's a gloomy picture, and The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness and Healing at the International Center of Photography, in New York, is not for the squeamish.
The show was assembled by Carol Squiers, a curator at the center, from the work of 16 documentary photographers, among them Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Donna Ferrato, Sebastiao Salgado and Marion Post Wolcott. Squiers has also written a substantial catalog.
The show takes in a lot of pictorial territory, from the now-familiar shots of maltreated child laborers by Hine, the early 20th-century reformer, to victims of the AIDS rampage in Africa by the South African photographer Gideon Mendel.
A section on the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal health initiative from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, details the plight of tenant farmers and migrant
laborers during the Depression, and some of the federal programs assisting them. Environmental
pollution is addressed by David Hanson, whose photographs of affected sites, and their monitoring by the Environmental Protection Agency, come with maps and written descriptions.
One of the sections that is most painful in its immediacy -- and the only one in color -- presents images from Lori Grinker's long-running project about war veterans. Addressing the lasting effects of war on the surviving wounded, it doesn't stint in its depiction of maimed bodies.
The psychological residue of combat is seen on the face of Henry Green, a British veteran of the Korean War, who survived the brutal Battle of the Imjin River in 1951. Almost half a century later, he still suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
A special slideshow of works from the exhibition and an interview with curator Carol Squiers can be accessed from the International Center of Photography's Web site at www.icp.org.
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