The first famous X-ray of a human body was, almost by accident, already art.
1895: an accidental first image
On 8 November 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen was experimenting with cathode-ray tubes when he noticed a faint glow from a fluorescent screen despite the apparatus being shielded. Something invisible was passing through materials that ordinary light could not.
Over the following weeks he tested the new rays on books, metal objects and other materials. Then came the image that changed everything: a radiograph of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand, with the bones and her wedding ring clearly visible. It became the landmark first anatomical radiograph of a living human subject. On seeing it, she reportedly said, “I have seen my death.”
The image spread rapidly. Newspapers and scientific publications reproduced Röntgen’s experiments, while doctors almost immediately recognised the clinical possibilities. Within weeks, X-rays were already being used to locate fractures and foreign objects. Radiology arrived as spectacle and medicine almost simultaneously.
In 1901, Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.
The 20th century: from novelty to standard of care
Over the following decades, X-ray imaging moved from curiosity to routine clinical practice. Film, chemistry and equipment improved steadily, and radiography became one of the basic ways medicine looked inside the body without surgery.
For much of the 20th century, the image was also a physical object. Sheets of radiographic film were developed, archived and clipped onto illuminated lightboxes for interpretation. Millions of people encountered a version of themselves — bone, structure, the architecture beneath their own skin — for the first time on film.
The aesthetic possibilities were visible early
Radiographic images never looked like ordinary photographs. Their stark tonal range, transparency and strange intimacy removed surface detail and left structure behind. What made them clinically useful also gave them a visual language of their own: factual and precise, but completely alien to normal sight.
That tension — documentation that also feels abstract — is why X-ray imagery has continued to move beyond medicine into photography, design and art.
The 1990s–2000s: digital replaces film
Digital radiography changed the practical picture. Images could be captured electronically, stored without physical archives and shared across hospital systems in seconds. Picture archiving and communication systems, or PACS, gradually replaced the film-based workflow.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, digital systems steadily supplanted screen-film radiography in many departments. The lightbox that had defined diagnostic imaging for generations began to disappear, replaced by high-resolution monitors and digital archives.
Where EXPOSED picks up the thread
EXPOSED starts where that clinical history becomes material history. Medical imaging film has a density, translucency and physical presence that a screen does not. It holds an image as an object: something light can pass through, something that changes depending on how it is displayed, and something that rewards a closer look.
As medicine moves further into digital workflows, that physical medium becomes increasingly unusual. EXPOSED keeps it in circulation — still doing what it was built to do: reveal structure beneath the surface, just aimed at a different kind of subject.
See the material in its current form in the Signature collection, or read more about how we work with it.