4.3.1: Practicing Critique

Between the Terminal Imaginaries (4.2.1) and Tuberculous Imaginaries (4.2.4) installations, I developed a photo essay for the digital humanities methods journal Epoiesen. I will not go into much detail as to the written content, because it is openly accessible online,¹ but I want to address two aesthetic aspects of the project: 1) the modes of opacity employed and 2) the use of a web platform for the aesthetic and academic argument.

The essay incorporated a text heavy preamble, then a separate page which hosted the visual and interactive elements, and then another block of text as a conclusion. The images were drawn from primary sources consulted in the Terminal Imaginaries installation, looking specifically at the dermatological textbooks sampled for projector A (4.2.1) (figs. 1 & 15). The project revised these images with different modes of excision, cutting away the material in the image until only the disease remained (figs. 2 & 3).

Figure 1. Sherwell, Samuel, and James C. Johnston. “A Case of Xanthoma Diabeticorum.” In Transactions of the American Dermatological Association at Its Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting, edited by Frank Hugh Montgomery, 165–72. Chicago: P. F. Pettibone & Co., Printers, 1901.

Figure 28.

Figure 15.

Figure 40.

The choice to cut away at the image, to frame through erasure, through an activation of the opaque, was decided by two criteria. The first moment of erasure was intended to frame the interventions by medical professionals. The hands that grab the head of a patient (fig. 41), or the mechanical apparatuses that hold a patient in place. The second layer of erasure was to display clinical photography’s assumed desire: the actual embodied symptoms found on the bodies of the sitter. Visitors to the photo essay page could flip through the images with the use of a little bit of simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) incorporated into the page’s HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). The next two sections (4.3.2, 4.3.3) will describe the process in each, briefly.