lil.sub.chrxssy: To Hofrat Behrens, in The Magic Mountain, the pulmonary X-rays of his patients are diagnostic tools. To Hans Castorp, serving an indefinite sentence in Behrens’s TB sanatorium, and made lovesick by the enigmatic, unattainable Clavdia Chauchat, “Clavdia’s X-ray portrait, showing not her face, but the delicate bony structure of the upper half of her body, and the organs of the thoracic cavity, surrounded by the pale, ghostlike envelope of flesh,” is the most precious of trophies.

amanda_Wyatt: photographs of car accidents which the narrator’s friend Vaughan collects while preparing to stage his own death in a car crash. The acting out of his erotic vision of car death is anticipated and the fantasy itself further eroticized by the repeated perusal of these photographs.

aly_b1rch: At one end of the spectrum, photographs are objective data; at the other end, they are items of psychological science fiction.