Perrine Gaudry

The first hermaphrodite photographs date from 1860 by Nadar. They are mostly framed by an anatomical and medical perspective according to which hermaphroditism is a pathology. However, one can read something much more ambiguous in this series. Other relationships are played at the margins of categories of gender, sex, sexuality, reality and fiction. I propose to re-read these photos according to the perspective of what I call a “reserve of imagination.” Reserve of imagination consists of dream visions from which new universes emerge. It also emphasizes the potential for heterotopic places to remain marginalized. This other interpretation of Nadar was developed in the photographic sense of the term; it developed afterwards through the work of SMITH, French contemporary artist working among other things on gender. The very idea of indeterminacy, which constitutes SMITH’s queer thinking and aesthetics, was already present in Nadar’s notable use of blurring and framing. SMITH’s photographs of intersex people radically overturn the anatomical and medical gaze: intersex is no longer a pathology. If, the medical thought of the 19th and early 20th century would have liked to visually include hermaphrodites in the category of the degeneration, it did not succeed, thanks to this reserve of imagination.