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Disfiguration became an artistic phenomenon in the wake of World War I. Surrealism dismembered the human figure into separate objects playing upon psychological and sexual metaphors that grew out of the anxiety of the moment. Hans Bellmer, for example, staged sculpted caricatures of violently contorted female bodies that alluded to a sadistic desire for either murder or rape. Two gelatin silver prints from Bellmer’s 1934 anonymous book The Doll (Die Puppe) depict a figure in various prostrate positions. In the first instance, the artist draped one flimsy doll across a broken chair, as if it had been thrown against a studio prop. The second image captures a female body that does not consist of a face but instead morphs further, growing additional breasts and buttocks. As Hal Foster wrote, “For Bellmer these variations of the first poupee produced a volatile mixture of joy, exaltation, and fear, an ambivalence that sounds fetishistic in nature.” (4) Bellmer’s work expressed the aggressive tension that underlies desire and was well received in Paris during the late 1930s, although most surrealists preferred not to work with the same visceral subject matter. (5)

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Bellmer’s contemporary Man Ray was also working in Paris, creating photographs that depicted fragmented female forms but without the kind of aggression that had characterized Bellmer. Anatomies (1930) and Lee Miller (Neck) (1930), for example, represent the head of a woman that is tipped back and turned away from the camera so that all one sees is the neck’s expanse between chin and shoulders. Man Ray’s subtle interest in sexual fantasy and gender identity continues in Lee Miller (Torso) (1930), which captures the bare chest of the artist’s muse but denies any representation of the sitter’s face. Anonymity prevails while minimal form takes on its own aesthetic. Six years prior, Man Ray captured the shapely back of Kiki de Montparnasse in Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), adding a pair of decorative “F”-holes that suggested the model was not just a woman but also an instrument available for play. Man Ray’s interest in nuance appeared through his articulation of shadows, used as a contrast that gave shape to form. (6) Moreover, his ability to repeatedly capture the lyrical, passionate pose of each sitter–reclining either as a delicate nude or dressed in light negligee–found a demand outside of surrealism within the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, where the body was broken down further into various sites for consumption. By the late 1930s Man Ray’s uncanny artistic process had already attained significant stature within Modernist artistic discourse since it bridged fashion with art, transforming both into chic and stylish mediums.

The tragic metaphors that first surfaced in surrealist photography became a reality in World War II. This grotesque transformation made war photography a sub-style within photojournalism, moving it beyond the practice of art. Founded in 1936 by Henry Luce, LIFE magazine grew out of the American public’s demand for realism that had developed earlier during the Great Depression. Just as the Farm Security Administration employed Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn to capture the socio-economic impact of the Depression across the United States, LIFE sought to further this mission by publishing documentation of as many lived experiences as possible. The visual documentation of public health care, for example, was an important topic. However, this monthly periodical eventually became a repository for photography taken from the front lines of battle during World War II. (7)

During the Vietnam War all published images originally had to be approved by the U.S. military, but soon after Nick Ut’s infamous image of a U.S. napalm bomb attack on a Vietnamese village, war photography was no longer a site that depicted a specific government agenda. Instead, it became a vehicle through which the American public came to view the cruel acts of its own military upon innocent civilians. LIFE magazine folded in 1972, most likely as a result of the public’s disenchantment with such sensational images. In addition, as war photography became the style that was able to incur the most money, some artists like W. Eugene Smith ventured to stage war scenes within their studios and created false histories that fell into the realm of propaganda. (8)