Narrator: In her series It’s Not My Body, Josephine Pryde references the history of darkroom photography and current methods for creating medical images. Here's the artist.
Artist, Josephine Pryde: What you can see here are superimposed MRI scans on a landscape. The MRI scans are of a fetus around 22 weeks old.
The landscape images were deliberately shot under very strong filters in a very strong light, on an unknown island somewhere on planet earth to give a sense of a kind of science fiction taking place.
These days it's really normal to meet somebody, and he or she will show you an ultrasound scan of their child. And I was becoming interested at the prevalence of these images. I'm interested in working with photography in a way that can look at all the different kinds of things which are photographs. I was also interested in investigating ways in which we could respond to developing technologies in this area and how what we see might influence what we might think.
Photography has a way of enabling us to see things that the naked eye cannot. And that very simple idea is one that's accompanied me through a lot of my work because it can be a starting point to try out all kinds of things in terms of asking the question, "Well, what is it that we're not seeing?"