Photographing Aids

On Capturing a Disease in Pictures of People with Aids

Bibliographic Data

ID15024767
AuthorsLukas Engelmann (0000-0002-2175-0156, University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume90
Issue2
Pages250-278
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueBulletin of the history of medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-5140 • E-ISSN: 1086-3176
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/bhm.2016.0053
PMID27374848
OpenAlexW2461897874
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited11

The photography of people with AIDS has been subject to numerous critiques in the 1980s and has become a controversial way of visualizing the AIDS epidemic. While most of the scholarly work on AIDS photography is based in cultural studies and concerned with popular representations, the clinical value of photographs of people with AIDS usually remains overlooked. This article addresses photographs as a "way of seeing" AIDS that contributed crucially to the making of the disease entity AIDS within the history of medicine. Cultural studies methods are applied to analyze clinical photography in the case of AIDS, thus contributing to the medical history of AIDS through the lens of photography. The article reveals the conflation of disease morphology and patient identity as a characteristic feature of both clinical photography and a now historical nature of AIDS

Aesthetics · Art · Conflation · Disease · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Pathology · Photography · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · History · Medicine · Participatory Visual Research Methods

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