Surface Imaginations by Hurst Rachel Alpha Johnston;

Author:Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

This “hideous” photograph, which exposed all of Tigerlily’s flaws, was the last thing she remembers seeing before her surgery. Once again, Tigerlily makes reference to the importance of lighting in her perception of the attractiveness of her face: the lighting in the surgeon’s photograph casts “unflattering shadows” and displays every imperfection. Succumbing to general anaesthesia was a kind of relief for Tigerlily from looking at this grotesque photograph, which held the expectation that she would awake with a face that no longer resembled the photograph. It is also significant that although she casts doubt on her memory, Tigerlily remembered the surgeon’s photograph as black and white, not colour. Her remembrance of the surgeon’s photograph as black and white can be thought of in two ways. First, if we probe the connection between black and white photography and state identification and fine art photography, an authority is automatically conferred on the surgeon’s photograph. Until relatively recently in Canada, all photographs on documents like licences and passports were black and white,29 so the surgeon’s black and white photograph can be read in relation to these identification photographs as an unbiased representative of Tigerlily’s face. The fine art photograph takes its authority from so-called high culture, so the black and white photograph can also be associated with a particular economic value.

Second, the black and white photograph can be seen as representative of historical photography, rather than state photography, in Tigerlily’s narrative. Making the connection between the surgeon’s photograph and historical photography means that the photographed face that Tigerlily saw immediately before she went under general anaesthesia is situated firmly in her past. Like the faded and torn archival photograph, the surgeon’s photograph of Tigerlily was a representative of an earlier period that no longer existed in her narrative. As she lost consciousness, Tigerlily took one final, ephemeral look backward at the face she was about to defeat through surgery, and she looked forward to a time when she would no longer face the flaws and “unflattering shadows” that age left across her face.

Each of the photographs discussed above operated as a reminder and evidence for the patient or surgeon. For Tonya, Diana, and Tigerlily, these medical evidence photographs depicted their bodies in an undesirable manner that they sought to ameliorate through surgery. I have outlined the social and cultural implications of before and after photographs in cosmetic surgery, and so far I have argued that cosmetic surgery relies on these photographs specifically in order to sustain the practice through the production and evaluation of these photographic surfaces.

Before and After

The documentary use of photography for the cosmetic surgery profession has been significant and pervasive, but before and after photographs offer documentary proof of only a particularly sanitized, surface imagination version of the surgical story. To put it in more explicit terms, the photographs that are most commonly used to record cosmetic surgery expunge the “surgical” component entirely, and it is impossible to tell if the alteration has occurred through changes to the body or changes to the photograph.

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