Les Gueules Cassées. Photography and the Making of Disfigurement

Abstract

Between 1914 and 1918, French visual culture was saturated with photographs of amputees: ex-combatants who had lost an arm or a leg, and had substituted them for prosthetic devices. However, these pictures were all about body mutilations. Facial injuries were also profusely photographed, but barely penetrated into the French visual culture. This article explores the reasons behind this invisibility. It maintains that, during the war, bodily mutilations were associated with discourses on re-education, while facial wounds were connected to the rhetoric of reconstruction. This distinction, grounded on concerns about the function of the limbs and the appearance of the face, was the source of the sparse dissemination of photographs of facial injuries. It will be argued that these wounds became visible only when the focus shifted from the appearance to the social function of the face, and facial injuries began to be understood as ‘disfigurement’.

Keywords:

• facial injuries
• mutilations
• disfigurement
• re-education
• facial reconstruction
• First World War
• photography

Acknowledgments

Many thanks are due to David Houston Jones for inviting me to contribute to this Special Issue, and to him, Marjorie Gehrhardt and the whole 1914FACES2014 team for giving me the opportunity to present my work in their workshops and conferences.

Notes

1 SPA, C609.40850 Paris 29.04.16, École professionnelle de mutilés. BDIC-MHC.

2 SCA, 14.18 A 902 “Le retour à la terre des mutilés”, 1919, ECPAD.

3 MH3744 Jourdheuil; Sous-lieutenat Édouard Fein (10.15-02-17). Archives du musée des services de santé de l'armée, Val de Grâce.

4 Album Centre Maxillo-Faciale, Lyon; Service de chirurgie maxillo-faciale de l'ambulance americaine de Neully. Val de Grâce.

5 Agence Meurisse, “Le Val de Grâce”, 1915. BnF.

6 Andrew Bamji argues that British veterans did not establish a similar association, partly because the hospitals already had rehabilitation and teaching programmes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Beatriz Pichel

Notes on contributor

Beatriz Pichel is Research Fellow at the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC), De Montfort University, Leicester. As a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow (2014-2016), her work examined how photographic practices affected the understanding of emotions and the performance of gestures in psychology and theatre at the turn of the nineteenth century in France. Her research has been published in History of the Human Sciences, Endeavour and Fotogeschichte, among others. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the cultural history of First World War photography in France.