Mark Kessell knows something about bodily disorder – he trained as a doctor before dedicating himself to the practice of photography. Indeed there is a quality that is nearly clinical in his regard, a kind of blunt probing for weakness or potential infirmity, which might owe something to his education, knowing all too well the brutal corporeality of our existence. In photography he is still charting this outer limit where our margins fray and the coherent illusions of self begin to crumble. There is a direct correlation between the broken surface of these images and the way the body itself is broken into fragments, glimpses of a whole system with the parts interrelated, a precarious balance. This brokenness is of the body too, an inevitable sense of decay in the unchanging visual persistence of the photographed moment, a powerful dissonance between an illusive fixity and the relentlessness with which it moves away from us. This same conflicted physicality is also present in how Kessell presents the work, creating daguerreotypes which are distinctly optical in their effect, but at the same time perversely resistant to vision – the image can be seen only from a certain angle, otherwise it merely dissolves into the plate’s metal surface. Perhaps there is some relationship between the contingent state of these photographs and bodily experience itself, a sense of wholeness dependent entirely on how it is viewed, but which is just as likely to come apart in your hands, seemingly irrecoverable. In whatever other form these images might be seen that tenuous quality remains. These are portraits of a crashing vulnerability, and it’s one we all share.
Kessell's own website is here and this article provides some useful background.
