Paul Caffell takes the so traditional, so often over-used subject of photography, the female nude, and reanimates its forms through a personal vision and a singular application of the printer’s art.  There is no easy faux-eroticism on offer here, no spurious ecstasy.  The transformations wrought in an image such as Body Marks are such that the body’s sexuality becomes uncertain.  The head, almost invisible, the shoulders, thrust towards a crepuscular obscurity.  The torsion of the figure, the skin’s dirt and scratches reminds us of the stilled, broken bodies prosaically photographed in morgues and at scenes of crime as much as they point us towards the archetype of all body marks in the Western art, those of Christ scourged as much as Christ crucified.  The skin texture and its “damage” may draw us to reflect on religious art, but Caffell’s image shares a striking unity with certain of those extraordinary pictures by Brassai, published in the premier issue of the dissident Surrealist journal Minotaure, accompanying an essay by Maurice Raynal on the “Varieties of the Human Body”, Caffell undertakes similar transformations of the form to those effected by Brassai.  But where the Surrealist body is the human figures as bestial, one element of the body a visual metaphor for some unknown, problematic other, Caffell uses the female body as anonymous, universal symbol for a fragility which is, finally, one of the defining signifiers of the human.

© Chris Townsend 1999

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