willwright

In 1981, Joseph Paul Jernigan was sentenced to death for stabbing and shooting 75-year-old Edward Hale, who discovered him stealing a microwave oven in Texas, USA. He was executed by lethal injection at 12:31 a.m. on August 5, 1993.

His cadaver was sectioned in the axial plane at 1 millimeter intervals and each of the resulting 1,871 slices were photographed for the Visible Human Project at the University of Colorado’s Health Sciences Center.

The images were then put together into this animation above and played fullscreen on a computer, which was moved around by an assistant while being photographed in a dark environment. The resulting images are long-exposure “light paintings” of the entire cadaver. Variations in the movement of the computer during each exposure created differences in the shape of the body throughout the series.

Illustration of long-exposure technique