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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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December 10, 2002
Precious Kodak moments
Through the faded mists of time we reach for an understanding of how people used to think and live. We read books of history, watch documentary reports on the History Channel. Yet true understanding eludes us.
For example, I've recently become aware of the phenomenon of "posture photos." Apparently, it was common practice for 30 or 40 years -as late as the early 1970s- to routinely have freshmen at many of our elite colleges pose for nude clinical photos.
This wasn't the rednecks from out in corn country. Tens of thousands of the nation's blueblooded elite at Vassar and Yale were sent to the gym and told to submit to full frontal nudity, as well as profile shots with metal pins taped up and down the spine to emphasize the angles of their spine curvature. Among those said to have submitted to this photography: Diane Sawyer, George Pataki, Hillary Rodham, Bob Woodward and Meryl Streep.
Hard telling just what the schools were thinking, but some of these photos made their way to WH Sheldon. He was the fellow who came up with the widely known categorization of human body types as ectomorphs, endomorphs and mesomorphs. The controversy surrounding his work constitutes another fascinating story.
What really strikes me about the posture photos, though, is that this system existed at all. Tens of thousands of our best and brightest actually went to the gym and took off their clothes, and let some photographers take nekkid pictures. This boggles my mind. I can't imagine such a thing happening now. Were all students seriously THAT obedient to authority? What could they have been thinking, either the administration or the students?
You could easily enough hire a few hundred students to voluntarily become subjects for a photographic study. That doesn't strike me as even controversial.
Universal mandatory nude photos constitutes a whole other kind of phenomenon. What kind of weird bonding shame was going on amongst the students? Everybody walks around campus knowing that everyone else has likewise been subjected to this little mini-rape? You could think of it as weirdly egalitarian, maybe.
I'm just trying to wrap my mind around some idea what could have been going on in people's heads here. I'm not getting any plausible understanding yet. For now we see through a glass, darkly.
posted by Al at 12/10/2002 10:10:00 PM
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