Visualising disability in the past

Abstract

In recent years there has been a growth in interdisciplinary work which has argued that disability is not an isolated, individual medical pathology but instead a key defining social category like ‘race’, class and gender. ¹ Seen in this way disability provides researchers with another analytic tool for exploring the nature of power. Running almost parallel in time with these academic developments has been a growing interest in the use of the visual in educational research. This growth in interest may be explained by Catherine Burke’s observation that images – line drawings, still photography, film, video and digital technologies – have accompanied the development of state education from its beginning and that ‘the camera within the School has its own historical narrative reflecting change and continuities in ways of seeing education and children over time’. ² In 2007 a workshop was held at the European Conference on Educational Research, Ghent which brought together academics to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue around a set of images that capture disability and pedagogical practice. ³ This article consists of three commentaries on the photographs (Devlieger; Van Hove and Vanobbergen; Grosvenor) which were given at the workshop and some reflective remarks written after the workshop (Simon). The commentators were given a maximum of 10 minutes each and their points are presented here very much as they were in the workshop, but references have been added and appear in the footnotes. ⁴ The article opens with some brief contextual information about the archive which holds the selected photographs and the process by which the workshop came into being.

¹ See, for example, Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 763–793.

² C. Burke, “Visualising the body of the school child: critical reflections on spaces of representation,” unpublished paper, 2.

³ Thanks are offered to Dr Catherine Burke, lead convenor of Network 17 Histories of Education, for organising the workshop

⁴ There was a fourth commentary at the workshop by Dr Paul Conway, University of Cork.

Keywords:

• disability
• photography
• visual methodologies

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Notes

¹ See, for example, Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 763–793.

² C. Burke, “Visualising the body of the school child: critical reflections on spaces of representation,” unpublished paper, 2.

³ Thanks are offered to Dr Catherine Burke, lead convenor of Network 17 Histories of Education, for organising the workshop

⁴ There was a fourth commentary at the workshop by Dr Paul Conway, University of Cork.

⁵ The authors would like to thank Dr Guislain’s Museum for supporting this project and for permission to reproduce the images. The images remain the copyright of the museum.

⁶ See Evi Reynaert, “‘Les enfants anormaux’ voor de lens. Een onderzoek naar de visie van Broeder Ebergiste De Deyne op kindren met beperking” (upublished thesis, Universiteit Gent, 2007).

⁷ D. Mac Dougall, “Introduction: Meaning and Being,” in The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006).

⁸ Ibid,. 1–10.

⁹ W. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

¹⁰ R. Garland‐Thomson, “Ways of Staring,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (2006): 173–192.

¹¹ Disability Studies in Education: Readings in Theory and Method, ed. S. Gabel (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 1.

¹² G. Albrecht, ed., Encyclopaedia of Disability, Vol. 3 (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2006), 1394–1398.

¹³ B.G. Jefferis and J.L. Nichols, The Project Gutenberg E‐Book of Searchlights on Health: The Science of Eugenics, available from www.gutenberg.org/etext/13444. 2004.

¹⁴ M. Simpson, “Bodies, brains, behaviour: the return of the three stooges in learning disability,” in Disability Discourse, ed. M. Corker and S. French (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), 150–155.

¹⁵ T. Richardson, “The Home as Educational Space: Bayonne Housing and the Architecture of Working Class Childhood, 1917–1940,” Paedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000): 299–337.

¹⁶ A. Van Gennep, Naar een kritische orthopedagiek, in het bijzonder van de zwakzinnige mens (Amsterdam: Boom Meppel, 1980).

¹⁷ R. Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

¹⁸ C. Barnes, G. Mercer and T. Shakespeare, Exploring Disability: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge Polity Press, 1999), 195.

¹⁹ C. Barnes, and G. Mercer, Disability (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).

²⁰ Collection Photographs (Paris: Steidl, 2007).

²¹ R.Samuel, “The ‘eye of history’,” New Statesman & Society, 18 December 1992/1 January 1993: 41; P. Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 21–23.

²² A. Novoa, “Ways of Saying, Ways of Seeing: Public Images of Teachers (19th–20th century),” in The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education. Paedagogica Historica Supplementary Series (Ghent, 2000): 21–52.

²³ See I. Grosvenor, “On Visualising Past Classrooms”. In Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom, ed. I. Grosvenor, M. Lawn and K. Rousmaniere (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 85–104 and I. Grosvenor, M. Lawn, A. Nóvoa, K. Rousmaniere and H. Smaller, “Reading Educational Spaces: The Photographs of Paulo Catrica,” Paedagogica Historica 40, no. 3 (2004): 315–332.

²⁴ D. Benin and L. Cartwright, “Shame, Empathy and Looking Practices: Lessons from a Disability Studies Classroom,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 2 (2006): 155–171.

²⁵ For arguments about the aesthetic image see Marcia Mular Eaton, “Locating the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsemeyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Abigail Solomon‐Godeau, Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

²⁶ See Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works, 1973–1983 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984) and “The Body in the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1987): 3–64.

²⁷ F. Gasparin and M. Vick, “Picturing the history of teacher education,” History of Education Review 35, no. 2 (2006): 16–31.

²⁸ Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards, “Traffic in Pain,” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina Duganne (Chicago: Williams College Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9.

²⁹ Anje Tervooren, “Bildung im Blick,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 52, Beiheft (June 2007): 172–185.

³⁰ Ebergist De Deyne, L’éducation sensorielle chez les enfants anormaux (Gand: Procure des Frères de la Charité, 1922).

³¹ René Stockman, “Br. Broeder Ebergist De Deyne (1887–1943): een levensschets,” Orthopedagogica LV, no. 4 (1993): 15–24.

³² Zuur, zoet of bitter. Broeder Ebergist (1887–1943) en de ‘Zintuiglijke Opvoeding’. Tentoonstelling 10 november 1993–27 februari 1994 (Ghent, Museum Dokter Guislain, [1993]) (the photographs selected here are in this catalogue); Patrick Allegaert and Annemie Calliau, eds, Geen rede mee te rijmen (Sint‐Martens‐Latem: Aurelia Books, 1989).

³³ Martin Kemp, “‘Une image parfaitement fidèle’. L’esprit et le corps en photographie médicale avant 1900,” in Photographie et science. Une beauté à découvrir, ed. Ann Thomas (Ottawa: Musée des beaux‐arts du Canada), 120–149.

³⁴ De Deyne, L’éducation sensorielle, 146; Marcel Van Walleghem, “Broeder Ebergist Gustaaf De Deyne (1887–1943). Pionier van het zwakzinnigenonderwijs in België,” in Allegaert and Calliau, Geen rede mee te rijmen, 217–224.