From Modern to Postmodern, Representation of Sick Bodies in the Art of Photography

It has been observed that visuality has gained prominence with the social transformations in 20th and 21st centuries. And parallel to this, more emphasis has been put on body work. In this period, individual's body has been identified as the focal point where body politics has been materialized and located. In this context, today, the number of works on Photography and Body Sociology has increased and became much more important. This is also a body related study, which analyzes how sick bodies, that is, bodies which are neither in their normal forms nor physically and mentally healthy, are represented in the art of photography. While modernism has had an understanding of ideal and beautiful body, a notion of golden ratio since Renaissance, in postmodernism we encounter an understanding of body, in which all aesthetic codes fall apart. This study provides the reader with the opinions of different modernist and postmodernist thinkers who clarify the concept of body within social and cultural contexts, which is very important for the analysis of photographs. Moreover, it has been carried out as an interdisciplinary work because of eclectic structure existing today, The analysis has been made on photos of sick bodies by proceeding from the following questions: how compatible has been the ego-perception in postmodernism with visual codes of the period? And How well do these codes match with the footprints of artists' works? This thesis study has been carried out as a literature research to determine the photographers who has chosen the sick bodies as the subject of their work in our time while the concepts of ideal, normal and healthy change and develop continuously. It will shed light to future studies in this area as it covers quite an extensive research on sick bodies.