[X-Ray, Broken Right Femur]
"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.
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.