in the very bodies

There it was in front of my eyes again (but wasn't it in fact still inscibed in my mind and in my flesh?), that working class environment I had grown up in, the incredible poverty that is palpable in the appearances of all the houses in the background, in the interiors, in the clothes everyone is wearing, in the very bodies themselves. It is always startling to see to what an extent bodies in photographs from the past (...) appear before our eyes as social bodies, bodies of a certain class.

- Retruning to Reims, Didier Eribon (2009)