guest blog

This blog post is part of our Emotions and Ethics series, following the webinar ‘Emotions and Ethics: the use and abuse of historical images,’ held on 17 June 2020. This guest blog is written by Dr Jennifer Wallis, a historian based at Imperial College London.

Picturing Death: Dealing with Post-Mortem Images

Ten years ago I began a PhD in the history of 19^th century psychiatry, focusing on the body in British asylum practice. During my work in the archives, I came across a photograph album kept by a pathologist that would come to shape and inform much of my PhD. In the album, alongside patient portraits, pathological specimens, and photomicrographs, were several photographs of dead patients in the asylum mortuary.

The post-mortem photograph is one of several variants of death photography. ‘Ever since cameras were invented,’ writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), ‘photography has kept company with death’. Unlike the romanticized post-mortem photograph popularized by Stanley Burns’ Sleeping Beauty collections and The Thanatos Archive, the post-mortem images I worked with were very ‘raw’ images of the dead body. There was no attempt to arrange the body in an aesthetically pleasing manner, much less to construct the illusion of a person who was merely sleeping. Limbs were contorted into impossible positions, mouths frozen into gasping O’s.

Post-mortem photography

Like the ‘unconventional’ medical portrait of the blood-spattered surgeon described in Daniel Fox and Christopher Lawrence’s Photographing Medicine (1988), the post-mortem photograph was not intended for dissemination. Rather, it was ‘private imagery’ shared among doctors. In the photographs I worked with, the main reason for the photographs being taken seemed to be to record the contraction of patients’ limbs, but some simply documented spectacular or anomalous bodies.

The images in the album were instructive, however. They helped to illuminate practices of asylum photography, the use of pathological instruments, and (by examining the backgrounds of pictures) hospital architecture. I still have a photocopy of the album, which the archive allowed me to make for my research. It is covered in my handwritten notes – matching a patient or pathological specimen to a case record, for example, or occasionally to a published article by one of the asylum staff. I have meticulously noted the measurements of each photograph, and arrows in bright blue ink point to features within the images that I thought important. Looking back at this photocopy now, I see that I didn’t make any notes about my emotional reactions to the images. Did I really not have any? Or did I purposefully concentrate my attention on other things: the dark sheets the bodies lay upon, the pieces of equipment visible on the table, the tiled mortuary wall in the background?

Somewhere along the line my immediate emotional response to these images has been lost. Ten years ago, I don’t think I experienced these images as particularly shocking or upsetting. Yet, over time, I seem to have undergone an opposite process to desensitization: I have come to find these images increasingly difficult to look at. Roland Barthes’ punctum (the intense personal effect a photograph may have on a viewer) is fluid and changeable, with the affective power of photographs shifting over time. Correspondingly, our interpretation of the ethics surrounding such images may also shift: Why do I still have these images in my office? What do I expect to do with them.

No simple answers

The questions I pose here have no simple answers, just as there is nothing straightforward about images of death. What the images depict is messy, unfathomable, abstract yet painfully real. For some, these are easy sources to work with. For others, they are impossible objects. For many of us, the position is somewhere in between. I confess that I remain fascinated by many of these images. They are valid subjects of historical inquiry that I continue to work with, but they can come with a heavy burden. I will wonder, towards the end of the afternoon, why it is that I feel suddenly depressed, crestfallen. Oh! Of course! I’ve spent the day alone, looking at images of death.

Much scholarship about the ‘emotion work’ of research focuses on research with living participants –interviews, for instance. The experience of working with historical materials is less often discussed. In her recent blog for this website, Beatriz Pichel articulates similar experiences to mine in regard to the historical photographs she works with and suggests that we acknowledge our emotional responses to such materials as a valid part of the research experience. Alongside the recognition that our research can have significant emotional effect, there is a need for more guidance and support – especially for PhD students embarking on a course of research that will be, for many, a very solitary endeavour. At the University of Sheffield Kay Guccione and colleagues have produced a guidance paper for those engaged in ‘emotionally demanding research’. They offer several practical suggestions for researchers, including avoiding taking sensitive materials home and identifying peers and supervisors to take part in debriefing sessions. There are obvious ethical issues in looking at, reproducing, and disseminating images of the dead body. But we also have ethical duties to our students and colleagues: as well as thinking about what the researcher may do with such images, we should also be asking what such images may do to the researcher.

Author Bio

Dr Jennifer Wallis is a historian based at Imperial College London, where she is Lecturer in History of Science and Medicine in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication, and Medical Humanities Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Medicine. Her publications include Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum (2017) and the co-authored volume, Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, which was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019.

The next blog in our Emotions and Ethics series is about teaching the history of sexuality with difficult images, and is written by Dr Sarah Jones.

Teaching the History of Sexuality with Difficult Images

Teaching the history of sexuality can be a complicated process. We have to ensure intellectual rigour, of course; acting as guides through decades of rich scholarly debate, navigating complex theories, and working with students to think about a wide variety of different kinds of primary material. At the same time, though, the seminar room can often be a space for deeply personal reflection and discovery: Timothy Stewart-Winter has written on the need to handle the ‘confessional impulse’ when teaching a topic that feels so ‘natural,’ intimate, and innate to many students. Even further, classrooms in which issues such as gender, sex, sexuality, and the body are being interrogated are often intensely political spaces; spaces where discussions of the past have real ramifications for the way students understand and respond to these same issues in the present.

‘Looking history in the eye’

Images, and especially photographs of different kinds, have always been an important tool for me when I try to navigate this complex space. My students have often reflected on how affected they have been by ‘looking history in the eye,’ using sources that they say make the past, and the people who lived that past, feel more tangible, or somehow more human. Time and time again they remark in class feedback that photos make for more immersive teaching sessions, where they feel they are coming face to face with the history I am pushing them to think about. Depending on the sources and topic being covered, their reactions can be joyful or amused. Often, however, visual materials provoke feelings of discomfort, shame, or outrage – all responses I make space for and even encourage, and ask them to interrogate. While this is by no means without its flaws and some historians might prefer a more ‘objective,’ detached room, I am great advocate of using sources to help find a balance between the academic, the personal, and the political – giving students the resources to think through issues in the past, but also to reflect on what looking at the past can teach us about ourselves.

Recently, though, I’ve been starting to address the ethical ramifications of this kind of pedagogical approach. As I stated in the paper, I am becoming increasingly uneasy about reproducing images of sexualised bodies in my seminars and lectures. In particular, by putting these kinds of images out there, I am aware that I may be unwittingly replicating the power structures around race, class, and gender they were originally meant to serve. How, then, should I go about balancing the pedagogical power and importance of such images with such ethical dilemmas? I am keenly aware (and very frustrated) that I didn’t have any satisfying answers to offer in my paper. Instead, I saw it as an opportunity to engage with a group of generous scholars who are explicitly engaging with such issues around the emotional and ethical uses of historical images. The seminar as a whole was such an excellent opportunity to think about how we, as historical researchers, work with and respond to images that we might think of as difficult or sensitive: I hope my contribution also encouraged those present (and whoever might watch this back) to start further conversations about how such insights might also change our practice as educators, too.

Author Bio

Following a research fellowship with the Rethinking Sexology Project at the University of Exeter, Sarah Jones joined the University of Bristol as Lecturer in the History of Sexuality and Gender in January 2020. Her historical work looks at ‘popular’ sexual science in the early twentieth century, but she also undertakes research into creative and innovative pedagogical practice.

Part of our Emotions and Ethics series, this guest blog on medical photography in historical enquiry is written by workshop participant Jason Bate. In today’s blog, Jason explores what ethical engagements with medical photography might look like for historians and other researchers.

Entwined practices: ethical engagements with medical photography in historical enquiry

In recent years medical photograph collections have been recovered and repurposed as part of a museum providing an appropriate gateway to their resources as well as physical access to the material, ensuring that collections of long-term historical value are placed in the most appropriate publicly accessible repository. In the context of new propositions for a museum’s ecosystem and extending out from the medical institutions to others outside, the boundaries between ‘official collections’ and ‘informal archive collections’ are often porous and difficult to defend, from materials for scholars to ancestral images. Amidst this, the status of the WW1 medical photographs of facially injured soldiers as photo-objects is seen as precarious and collections management systems must respect the sensitivity of the communities outside of the museum, who are linked to these specific photographs.

Medical photography

With public access to these medical collections, relatives of the injured and disfigured ex-servicemen that were photographed by the Army Medical Services have been taken up in the business of memorialisation and reclamation. These family practices and the resulting remediation of museum space within community members’ personal connections, historical knowledge and medical heritage, can lead to a challenge of dominant public histories and to criticism of the often limiting context of the museum. Current visual repatriation methodologies are encouraging museums to reposition photographs as living entities, rather than limiting them to their traditional role of providing informative backdrops for surgical practices or demonstrating past lives of patients. Therefore, the positive benefits of visual repatriation for both museums and source communities, in terms of photographs acting as building blocks in cultural relations, generally far outweigh any negative consequences and costs.

Re-presentation and representation

Under the care of the families of ex-servicemen, bureaucratic records and photographs have been recovered from the museums, reinterpreted and placed into different and new circumstances, reclaimed as family possessions that desires to overturn their original oppressive logic. Even though the medical photographs are kept in collections external to this family community, the questioning of these institutional assumptions is a fruitful way to reassert the ex-service patients’ voice.

Devoid of asymmetrical relations, non-medical in character, the family members’ photographic encounter transcends the cultural distance and the medical outlook that we recognise in the genre of medical photography. Released of contemporary medical relations, the photographs situate outside, and become external to, military-medical practices. This presentation explores the aims and practices of the families in relation to the wider concerns and questions of visibility and occlusion, consent and complicity, of not showing, and about what is publicly present in the process of visual repatriation espoused by family validation, such as family desire for representation and fundamental questions about ‘how to care?’ and ‘who has the right to re-present?’

Author Bio

Jason is a historian of photography, with particular interest in Edwardian histories of medicine, the First World War, visual culture and medical humanities. He lectures in the practices and histories of photography at Falmouth University and is a cataloguer at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on medical photographic archives and collections and he has published in the journals Visual Culture of Britain, History and Technology, Social History of Medicine, Science Museum Group Journal, and contributed a chapter to Approaching Facial Difference: Past and Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). He is currently writing a book on the research ethics of working with medical and family archives for Bloomsbury’s History series.