Hostel is art!

Palen figured that a poster with mangled bodies wouldn't do the trick. So he dropped by the airy, tastefully decorated Manhattan studio of the Australian photographer Mark Kessell.

A soft-spoken former physician who practiced medicine in Sydney for what he calls "several unsatisfying years," Kessell, 49, now takes pictures of things he's fully aware the larger public may not appreciate. One collection of daguerreotypes, "Perfect Specimens," shows the human body in its physical extremes. There are several shots of fetuses and old people near death.

But it was Kessell's "Florilegium" (or "collection of floral images") daguerreotypes that caught Palen's eye. Each image is a close-up of a surgical instrument, so poetically rendered that it seems almost organic. Some of the macabre implements resemble exotic flowers. One, from a distance, could be mistaken for the horns of a gazelle.

"We were sort of blocked, and all the pieces fell into place once I saw that image," Palen said. A deal was made to use that daguerreotype, which actually shows a surgical clamp. It now appears in theaters and on widespread promotions. (Billboards for "Hostel" rely on a more conventional image of a masked tormentor with a chain saw.)

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