Decomposing corpse, Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, Knoxville, Tennessee, by Taryn Simon.
The research facility, also known as the body farm, is the world’s primary research center for studying, basically, how human bodies rot. It’s a 2.5 acre enclosed plot of land where they put a bunch of corpses in different conditions (in the woods, in car trunks, in houses, submerged in water, etc.) and observe them decay. All this to better be able to predict time of death, sex, race, etc. from dead bodies, to help solve murder cases.
The photo is part of Taryn Simon’s series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, which includes all manner of weird things: an Arab woman having her hymen reconstructed “to adhere to cultural and familial expectations regarding her virginity”; Kenny, a retarded white tiger, the result of inbreeding; cryopreservation units; a braille edition of Playboy; and nuclear-waste capsules submerged in water, seen through Cherenkov radition, which Wikipedia describes as “electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through an insulator at a constant speed greater than the speed of light in that medium.”
Fascinating stuff.
