Patients, Power and Representation
Clinical Photographs in Focus
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8364396 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michaela Clark (0000-0002-4109-4379, Stellenbosch University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 54 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 59-76 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | de arte (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0004-3389 • E-ISSN: 2471-4100 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00043389.2019.1580415 |
| OpenAlex | W2922343221 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 42 |
Historically framed as a “violent” medium, photography poses a series of ethical questions about what it means to look at vulnerable individuals. Yet, when it comes to photographs of the clinically unwell, concerns as to patient consent, private vs public ownership, and institutional responsibility circle even more acutely. Such material speaks to what Jane Nicholas has called the “fundamental tension in historical practice”—to both study and safeguard, to both reveal and hide. The aim of this article is to unpack the ethics and politics of representation as prompted by a disused collection of surgical photographs generated during the 20th century by the University of Cape Town’s medical school. While attending to the power relations inherent to the photographic medium as well as the discursive terrain of medicine, my argument is that it is only in acknowledging both the vulnerability of the patients depicted as well as the artefactual value and redemptive possibilities of such images that the current and future life of difficult historical photographs can be debated. Thus, by highlighting the complex nature of this and other (clinical) collection(s), I seek to raise and grapple with the uncertainties that inherently trouble much archival photographic material today
Focus (optics) · Optics · Physics · Political science · Power (physics) · Representation (politics) · Computer Science · Digital Imaging in Medicine · Empathy and Medical Education · Social Media in Health Education
The Burden of Representation
The Skin of the Film
Image Matters
Vision, Race, and Modernity
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Feeling, Emotion, Affect
The Birth of the Clinic
The Cruel Radiance
A Pedagogy of Witnessing
Ethical Considerations for Clinical Photography in the Global South
Listening to Images
Behold the Tears’
Medical Archives and Digital Culture
Inventing the medical portrait
Disturbing Pleasures
At the Heart of Healing
Rwanda Revisualized
The looking/not looking dilemma
Beyond a clinical narrative
The Affect Theory Reader
A Debt to the Dead? Ethics, Photography, History, and the Study of Freakery
Anthropology, standardization and measurement
Regarding the pain of others
Black Bodies, White Science
The Body and the Archive
The Image of Objectivity
Absent Histories and Absent Images
Photographs from the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, South Africa, 1890-1907
The Civil Contract of Photography
Black Bodies, White Bodies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |