When a dissection photograph is considered as an isolated image, its various components – student, scalpel, book, dissecting table, and cadaver – might all seem arbitrary; no more than accessible props, included solely for the execution of a singular grotesque tableau, a “macabre expression of students’ ghoulish perversity.”1 But when opportunity presents itself for examples to be viewed en masse, and considered as an evolving genre, it becomes readily apparent that each of dissection photography's distinct stages contain their own aesthetic and cultural conventions; remarkably, even in instances of performative hybridity, when components or tropes are purposefully deviated from or transgressed in order to form new ones.

To comprehend dissection photography as an evolving genre, we must first and foremost stop looking at the genre's raw elements, its repetitive subject matter (skulls, skeletons, and ‘stiffs’), the typology of the dissecting room, as the sole means of grouping and thus defining dissection photography in total. Evaluating a genre in this manner, argues Robert Stam, “fails to take into account how the subject is treated.”2 While this structure is decidedly more palatable to a broad, non-medically inclined audience, it fails to position or contextualize these subjects and their influences from a technical or sociocultural standpoint. In other words, we need to comprehend that not all photographs of dissected bodies were created equal.

In John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson's Dissection, the latter co-author emphasizes the importance of acknowledging dissection photography as a certifiable genre. Confirming this assertion may once again seem rather arbitrary. But I assure you, it is not. Accepting dissection photography as a legitimate photographic genre validates these images as important social documents. Validation also necessitates that both the photographic and medical communities acknowledge and reckon with the offenses represented throughout the genre's half-century evolution; specifically, how the culture of the American dissecting room, and thus, the institute of American medicine itself, participated in the systemic marginalization and targeted dehumanization of the bodies of African Americans. And yet, even if we accept Edmonson's declarations about the cultural significance of dissection photography (and indeed we should), questions remain regarding the genre's unspecified origins, its abject subject matter, and the conflicting meanings and intent behind a nexus of student posing conventions.