[X-Ray, Broken Right Femur]

Unknown

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 850

"Penetration of the body with light is one of the greatest visual experiences," pronounced the modernist photographer László Moholy-Nagy. The patient subjected to this X-ray might have cause to demur. Even so, the view of their severely fractured femur, seen through a wire-mesh sling, is exactly the sort of image that might have excited Moholy-Nagy and his peers. Following its discovery in 1895, X-radiography was embraced—and its aesthetic imitated—by avant-garde artists then seeking to upend conventional modes of perception. The technology expanded the spectrum of photographic possibility; by probing the dense matter of daily life, it visualized worlds otherwise inaccessible to the eye.

[X-Ray, Broken Right Femur], Unknown, Gelatin silver print

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