Soft Material Boundary Distorted (Excerpt)
by Sophia Park

The manipulation of inert materials can also tell us more about humans and our entanglement with these materials. Steven Uccello uses polishing pitch to understand the bodily changes he underwent in the past year. Polishing pitch is traditionally used to clean optical lenses, not necessarily as an actual material in photography. On a surface level, polishing pitch looks like a solid, but it is liquid in nature. Thus, when exposed to physical pressures like gravity, pitch will shift shapes—albeit very slowly. When Uccello began printing photographic materials directly onto the pitch, the photos would start to drip vertically due to the weight of the pitch and gravity. As time passed, the photos would change into an indiscernible object.

During 2021, Uccello lost 125 pounds. This transformation is captured in Gut (2022). A white T-shirt that belonged to Uccello before his weight loss is filled with black pitch. The shirt hangs on a metal pole where the pitch slowly falls, bringing the shirt along with it. The contrast between the white T-shirt and black pitch substantiates the weight of the material. The twisting of the shirt to ensure that the pitch stays inside accentuates the drapery of an absent body. Uccello complicates the methods by which organic bodies are represented by using an inorganic material. Normally, inorganic materials entering the body are considered dangerous—and, in fact, if the pitch is handled incorrectly, it is carcinogenic. Yet, if we suppose that the pitch itself contains the thing-power that Bennett proposes, then this complication becomes richer. The pitch is just as able to speak about the human body as any other material.

Uccello’s The Body Sans 125 lbs (2022), a series of black-and-white photographs, depicts this bodily transformation. Using infrared light, his camera penetrates the epidermal layer of the skin. Such depth allows for greater visibility of the texture and dimensions of the body. The crevices of the body are highlighted with the black-and-white contrast, further accentuating the skin folds and stretch marks that become visible. The fissures in the skin evoke a rolling mountainous range with deep valleys. The topographies of the skin serve as reminders of corporeal transformation, where the edges of the natural environment and the internal bodily environment are distorted. The boundaries in landscape photography and self-portraiture meld. Weight, especially in a society where expectations for how one looks physically, is tested time and time again.