Note: this post is incomplete, though I am uncertain - given there are 'not enough hrs in a day' - it ever will be. On September 14 I had the great pleasure of attending the Ethics, Aesthetics and Epidemiological Photography conference at Cambridge, and I wanted to share with you some of what I found to be the more memorable moments of this great, and intimate event. Here is a brief summary of the talks: An interesting line of discussion that came up through all the various presentations revolved around the question "what is epidemiological photography?" and "Is there such thing as an epidemiological photography?" After watching the presentations from historians about visual archives of epidemics in Asia and Europe, I would say there is certainly a distinct way of photographing epidemics, historically, that is different than picturing health, or healthcare (focused on visually representing practice), which is distinct, again, from medical photography (focused on symptoms or typologies). Ari Larissa Heinrich, the keynote speaker, talked about how medical photography has moved from being about life embodied in illness, to removing that life, objectifying the disease through focusing on the organ/tissue effected, without considering the patients - what he termed a necromemesis of medical photography. Another presenter echoed this visual reductionism in relation to AIDS photography - specifically in medical AIDS Atlases from the mid-1980s to the late 2010s. He traced the way personal signifiers at one time were included in the description of visible symptoms of infections related to AIDS (e.g., captioning a photo as "Lesions on a 23-year old caucasian male homosexual"). Such captions, which reinforced a ideological view of AIDS, presenting it as objective/authoritative science, would slowly disappear from the Atlases as the social and medical understanding of the disease became more sophisticated.
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