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SUMMARY:Picturing the unusual: medical photography as an 'experimental sys
 tem' - Lukas Engelmann (CRASSH)
DTSTART:20170124T170000Z
DTEND:20170124T183000Z
UID:TALK69616@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:45448
DESCRIPTION:What is specifically medical about medical photographs? Clinic
 al photography – the portrayal of disease symptoms - is usually consider
 ed to be the typical medical genre\, both historically and in the present.
   Merely a representation of diseases\, these photographs have been shown 
 to contribute to endeavours of classifying diseases\, of enabling the circ
 ulation of cases and of calibrating and influencing the notion of patholog
 y in medicine as well as in non-medical contexts. I combine research resul
 ts from my work on the visual history of AIDS with my current work on the 
 visual archive of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894 – 1959) to question th
 e scope and shape of this genre. In both cases\, clinical photography has 
 become a contested way of seeing. Photographs of the symptoms of people wi
 th AIDS became embroiled in representational politics and bound up in the 
 larger epistemological crisis of medicine in the first decade of the epide
 mic. Photographs of the Third Plague Pandemic on the other hand\, were lar
 gely concerned with ethnographic visualizations of the disease’s ecology
 \, while clinical photographs seem to have been mostly insignificant to th
 e advancement of knowledge about plague in the early 20th century.\n\nBoth
  cases extend our understanding of medical photography beyond the clinical
  photograph. Both cases also demonstrate the extraordinary significance of
  photography in the formation\, production and distribution of knowledge a
 bout disease in and outside of medical publications and discussions. My pa
 per will ask how we might be able to maintain a notion of medical photogra
 phy if it is not reliant on the visibility of symptoms and signs of diseas
 e. Employing medical photography as an ‘experimental system’ (Rheinber
 ger) I will tentatively argue for a wider understanding of medical photogr
 aphy as a picturing of unusualness and uncertainty in epidemic crises.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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