Humans without Bodies: DNA Portraiture and Biocybernetic Reproduction

In DNA portraits, a visualization of a DNA sample—an “inner” structure—comes to stand in for the individual represented in the portrait. This essay places DNA portraits within an intellectual approach to photography that regards the photographic process as a technique by which the invisible inside might be made material in the photographic image. DNA portraits do not share the same mode of production as photographic portraiture, and yet, despite significant technological and cultural shifts, the nineteenth-century image vernaculars survive within these twenty-first-century visual objects. DNA portraits point toward a larger cultural concern enabled by the genomic revolution: that of the ability of DNA to function as a material expression of some internal essence. DNA portraits also rely on computing and information-processing technologies, exposing the extent to which they draw on a framework of understanding that regards biological material in terms of bits of computing data.