Anthropology and Medical Photography: Ethnographic, Critical and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

The study of medical photography, inclusive of epidemiological and humanitarian applications of the genre, is a promising new field for visual anthropology. Focusing on the interlinked questions of visual witnessing and evidential ethics of medical photography, as well as on the entangled temporalities and dialectics of visibility and invisibility underlying this visual practice, the introduction to this special issue on medicine, anthropology and photography explores key issues arising out of recent work in the area. While reviewing the contributions of history, STS and photographic theory to the study of medical visual cultures, regimes and economies, we explore what a distinctively anthropological approach—through its ethnographic and comparative scope—offers to the topic.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the participants of the workshop Ethics and Aesthetics of Epidemiological Photography (CRASSH, University of Cambridge, Sept. 2013) and the panel Anthropology, Medicine and Photography at the Royal Anthropological Institute's Conference on Anthropology and Photography (British Museum, June 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christos Lynteris

CHRISTOS LYNTERIS is a social anthropologist working on biopolitical and visual aspects of infectious disease epidemics. He is Senior Research Associate at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded research project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic. He is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: Socialist Medicine and the New Man [Palgrave Macmillan 2012] and Ethnographic Plague: Configuring Disease on the Chinese–Russian Frontier [Palgrave Macmillan 2016], and editor of Cambridge Anthropology's special issue, “Epidemic Events and Processes” [2014]. E-mail: [email protected]

Ruth J. Prince

RUTH J. PRINCE is Associate Professor in medical anthropology at the University of Oslo and researcher at the Norwegian National Centre for Migration and Health. Publications include The Land is Dying: Contingency, Creativity and Conflict in Kenya [Berghahn Books 2010], written with Wenzel Geissler, and Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives [Ohio University Press 2013], edited with Rebecca Marsland. She is co-editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly’s special issue, “What is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival and the Politics of Life” [2012]. Her current research is on a Soviet-built hospital in Kenya. E-mail: [email protected]