Nietzsche somewhere asks, with typical provocativeness but not at all rhetorically, whether all of Western philosophy, from Socrates onwards, is anything more than a misunderstanding of the body. Not only philosophy, but also religion and even, to some extent, science, take the body to be the awkward envelope inside which our real lives are lived. Reason, it is reasoned - the mind, the soul - must be divorced from mere flesh, for which it is altogether too good. On the contrary, Nietzsche argues, the body is an equal partner in the adventure of living, and if we devalue it we devalue our essential selves.
In his foreword to The Century of the Body: 100 Photoworks 1900-2000, the editor, William A. Ewing, argues that "as a result of myriad efforts by practitioners [of photography] across a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines, our awareness, our knowledge and our appreciation of our bodies has grown - it is fair to say - exponentially over the past one hundred years". Certainly photography, the art of light and stillness, has offered us countless fragments of evidence of the centrality of the body to our way of being in the world. We may like to think we are essentially spirit, but the photograph is here to tell us about the flesh, whether we are an adolescent poring over the mundane mystery of the female nude, or an oldster dreaming among the faded snaps of a lost love from youth.
The photographs William A. Ewing has assembled here are a selection from the 500 shown in an exhibition for most of last year at the Musee de l'Elysee in Lausanne, of which Ewing is the director. The pictures are arranged chronologically, from the Synoptic Table of Facial Features assembled by Alphonse Bertillon in 1900, to last year's strangely disturbing "thermohydrogram" portrait of his own lips by Gary Schneider. Along the way we are presented with the broadest possible spectrum of images, some erotic, some shocking, some seductively beautiful.
Indeed, it is the seductiveness of photography that is one of its most striking features. Another is its ambiguity. Take the picture shown here, Study of the Human Body (1933), by Sasha Stone. At first we see it as a typical female nude, but look closer, as Ewing in his perceptive commentary invites us to do. Is the pose the model strikes inviting or defensive? Are we being asked to enter the model's space, or warned to keep our distance? As Ewing remarks, "should an overture be unwelcome, that readied arm and `claw' would serve as a vicious weapon of defence". Striking too is the importance of the inclusion of the lips, the Barthesian punctum which gives the picture its power (cover them up and see what happens). Most interesting of all, however, is the question of gender: is this in fact a woman? Might it not be a man in a womanly pose? Who says the camera never lies? It lies all the time, in the subtle and troubling way that all art lies.
The Century of the Body is less challenging, less viscerally shocking, than Ewing's previous volume, The Body (1994), but still it is a worthy addition to Thames & Hudson's superb library of photography books.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times