Life's a Gamble: Everything Decays. Take a Picture.

They're very different books in some ways. Dice is a small, slim photo essay, as light in tone as in weight. Mütter Museum is a hefty coffee-table tour-de-force with a large and heavy topic. But they're both in their way about decay. It's also worth noting that both were designed by my friend Laura Lindgren, who edited and published the Mütter tome as well.

Ricky Jay, as you know, is a great practitioner of close magic. I've seen him do astounding things with a deck of cards. But he's almost more likeable as a connoisseur and historian of sideshow, of learned pigs and other sports of nature, and of the unseemly arts of the con. It makes perfect sense that he'd have a collection of thousands of dice "of myriad size, shape, and color and of daunting variety: birdseye, bullseye, doughnut, barbudi, poker, baseball, golf, crown and anchor, bell and hammer, drugstore, razor, brushed, feathered, juice, weight, hits, missouts, tops, shapes, polyhedrons, teetotums, and rough-cut unnumbered cubes."

Since the 19th century, dice have been made of celluloid, which remains stable for decades. "Then, in a flash, they can dramatically decompose. The crystallization begins on the corners and then spreads to the edges. Nitric acid is released in a process called outgassing. The dice cleave, crumble, and then implode."

Purcell captures this process in a series of gorgeous color photographs. Some dice crumble like sugar cubes in tea. Others seem to melt slowly. Or they bleed out through their ruptured dots like oozing wounds. They crystallize into glassy shards. They discolor like corpses. They grow a dusty patina that obscures the faded dots, or develop cavernous holes in their faces like sufferers of advanced syphilis. Purcell reports that they often give off an acrid stench, as of death. In her closeup photos they can loom large as blown-down buildings, or they can seem to take on personalities, like bodies in a morgue.

Jay accompanies her photos with his customary high style/lowlife shtick-elegant historical anecdotes focused on curious arcana. One is not surprised to learn here that some form of dice has been around since the ancient Egyptians at least, and that gamblers appear to have been cheating with them just as long. You could fill a small library-Jay apparently has-with old books and pamphlets solely on the topic of cheating at dice. From India through the Roman Empire to the Americas, men have risked their lives, their freedom, fortunes, kingdoms and the outcome of wars on a role of the dice. In European Christian lore, men have lost their souls to the devil the same way. Reveling in queer details like the etymology of the word "craps" or the text of "The Litany of a Craps Dealer," Jay keeps the patter light and distractingly amusing-much as he does in his magic routine as he's picking your pocket or forcing an ace. It's Purcell's morbidly pretty photos that carry all the weight in this book.

Morbidly pretty photos is what Mütter Museum is all about, on a grand scale. It's the culmination of a project Lindgren has been conducting pretty much since she first visited the Philadelphia medical museum in 1986 and decided it needed to be shot by the best photographers she could get. By 1993 she was putting out a Mütter Museum calendar, the last of which was for 2002. This book brings together the photos from the calendars, plus a lot of historical images from the Mütter archives.

Mütter Museum will probably only sit on the coffee tables of those among us who like to see stunning photos of medical specimens and anatomical anomalies: the skeletons of giants and dwarfs, murderers' brains, presidents' tumors, preserved organs, two-headed babies, heads sliced like loaves of bread, wax models of people suffering from horrible pustules or with horns of bone growing out of their limbs. (At the gallery opening and book party a couple weeks ago, one was not surprised to see artists like Joe Coleman in the crowd.) The Mütter collection, begun in the 19th century, was used to teach medical students in the era before overhead projectors and computer modeling. If you wanted to show them the inside of the human head, you sliced one open and floated it in clear formaldehyde in a glass case.

Many of the diseases and deformities depicted in the collection were beyond the reach of the 19th-century doctors who compiled it. To Lindgren, there's something in their obsession with collecting and cataloguing what they didn't yet understand that signals how mysterious it still was to them. They were applying Cartesian logic to the ineffable-as though if they kept measuring and weighing these specimens of morbidity, kept naming abnormalities and counting the incidences, kept staring at and recognizing the signs of disease, eventually a cure would occur to them. The Mütter collection freezes that moment in medical history.

The book is more than historical photo-documentation. This is art photography of a very high, if outre, order. Small wonder eccentric photo artists like Witkin and Wegman got involved.

There's the strange, rather humorous shot of a young man wearing what appears to be a ripped paper bag over his head. The "bag" is in fact human skin. It had been flayed from a cadaver, then subjected to various stress tests until it ripped, to show surgeons how the skin reacts to incisions. The model in the photo is naked from the waist up, showing a really cool tattoo over his heart. Skin on skin.

That photo's by Max Aguilera-Hellweg. In the 1990s, after a very successful career as a medical photographer, he decided he didn't want to merely shoot surgery anymore, he wanted to practice it. He became a med student in middle age, and is continuing his studies now at Tulane. For another picture, Hellweg and Lindgren carried the preserved lower half of a human body upstairs from the museum to a grand lecture hall-where Hellweg hung it from a tripod so it appears to be floating up to the ceiling. The preserving process left the body looking like a model carved in resin; Lindgren reports that it was actually sticky to the touch, as though coated in sap.

Lindgren also once carted a carton of glass cases, in each of which floated a section of one of those sliced human heads. Some of the preserving fluid sloshed onto her clothes. It smelled powerfully of wintergreen. She drove back from Philadelphia to New York that day with the windows down, smelling like a giant LifeSaver.

It's odd and funny to see Wegman's Weimaraners, Chip and Battina, sticking their faces into a skeletal torso or posing with plaster casts of the Siamese twins Cheng and Eng. Scott Lindgren, Laura's brother, performed a similar kind of visual enjambment with the skeleton of Mary Ashberry, a 3-foot-6 dwarf who died after giving birth in Norfolk in 1856. Because Mary's small pelvis was preventing normal childbirth, the doctors crushed the baby's skull to deliver it. The Mütter houses both Mary's skeleton and her unfortunate baby's skull, and Scott posed her cradling that skull in the crook of her skeletal arm, offering a motherly care she was unable to offer in life.

Fanciful juxtapositions like that don't strike you as a modern, arty imposition on the collection when you see a 19th-century set of preserved reproductive organs strung up like Christmas tree ornaments. A certain artistic eye, even whimsy, is not unusual in old anatomical specimens; there are some in European museums where the specimens are downright Rococo in fussy style.

In that sense, Mütter Museum is carrying on a centuries-old tradition: documenting disease and death, and making an art of it.

Afterwords

Another friend of mine has produced a book I know Ricky Jay will want in his collection: James Taylor's Shocked and Amazed! (Lyons Press, 240 pages, $14.95), a collection of the articles and images that have appeared in his periodical journal on the history and much-diminished state of sideshows and freakshows, carnies and cons. If you think historical reenactments like the one at Coney are all there is to know about the sideshow, you need to educate yourself with this book. There are interviews here with bearded ladies and half-girls and hootchie-cootchie dancers. Articles on the carnie kings and great con men of the past and present (including one by me on P.T. Barnum's legacy in New York City, reprinted from this paper). And a wealth of reproduced banner art, pitch cards and other visual documents.

The sideshow may be all but dead today, but there's still a world of documentary evidence to be collected and oral histories to be recorded on this important segment of American popular culture. And it needs to be done without applying the distorting lens of contemporary political correctness that mars a lot of academic writing on the subject. James has become a raving fan of freaks, geeks and carnies as he's done his part to preserve their legacy; if that introduces another sort of bias, at least it's a corrective one, and I say long may he rave.