Brandon Zimmerman is an American writer, educator, collector, and scholar
Episode 413: Brandon Zimmerman is a fantastic new voice writer who writes about photography. His latest book, Dissection Photography Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity, published by Bristol University Press, investigates anatomical photography’s social, medical, and cultural history.
Throughout our conversation, Brandon and I untied the different stages of how university and medical professionals performed historically in the anatomy lab. It is more complicated than you think when you involve the camera. The students, as part of the fraternal order of son-to-be doctors, including women, had their own codes of practice that involved humor, absurdity, and the use of the corpse as a form of entertainment. Again, it is more complex than you might imagine. You have to picture your proximity to death daily, the smell of the lab, and the very act of what you are involved in to recognize the need to offset the morbidity of the moment with the imaginative space the camera provides, which gives a bulwark to the very difficult grind of death in the lab. Of course, things did go to far and that is also discussed in the conversation as well as racial implications of how both black doctors and corpses were issued their own codes of both conduct, but also placement within the hierarchy of post-civil war America.
Brandon and I got on like a house on fire being two passionate collectors of said images. We have some crossover with other collectors in the field such as Stanley Bruns, Geoff Reggie Shannon, and also the late Gretchen Worden from the Mutter Museum, which we spoke about at length. Please tune into this fascinating discussion!
