Photography Meets Body Art?

Photography meets body art?

If someone says you have “eyes in the back of your head,” they probably don’t mean actual eyeballs. They’re just saying you have an uncanny sense of what’s happening behind you. Unless, of course, you’re photographer Wafaa Bilal.

The controversial photography professor at NYU has taken experimental photography to the next level with his latest stunt: Bilal has implanted a digital camera in the back of his skull.

Bilal installed a thumbnail-sized, 10 mega-pixel digital camera on top of titanium plates under the skin at the back of his head. Dubbed “3rd I,” the project begins December 15 when the camera will start snapping one photograph every minute for an entire year. Each image will stream live at the new Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar.

An assistant professor in the photography and imaging department of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Bilal says the project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions.”

“An artist is a mirror reflecting the social condition,” says Bilal. “Do we really have privacy these days? How many times each day is our image taken without our knowledge?”

Of course, those concerns are shared by Bilal’s employer. In an effort to protect students’ privacy, NYU has asked that Bilal cover the lens when he is on campus.

While Bilal’s undertaking definitely has a myriad of artistic possibilities, I can’t help but imagine that most of his shots will be banal images of tile walls or the seams in his pillow. At the end of the year though, one thing’s for sure: he’ll have countless photographs of people puzzled by the sight of a man with a camera sticking out of the back of his head.

Images by Google