Article ID: CBB326372112

What faces reveal: Hugh Diamond’s photographic representations of mental illness (2022)

unapi

Hugh Diamond was a psychiatrist, antiquarian, and photographer, who was the first person to take photographs of female asylum patients. These photographs, using the newly invented technology of the camera, were intended to be objective and accurate visual indicators of mental illness. Considering Diamond’s overlapping interests, his project must be understood within the larger cultural and historical context and the tensions inherent in medical photography and portraiture. Despite the goal of capturing “objective, scientific data,” the photographs instead relied on traditional iconography dating back to the Greeks and Middle Ages and can be analyzed from an art historical perspective. As an antiquarian, Diamond collected portraits of his patients just as he collected various other objects. As such, while Diamond may be considered a humanistic leader of the moral treatment movement, his work in capturing these “specimens,” the female patients, reflects a perpetuation of the stigmatization of mental illness to be put on display for the Victorian audience.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB326372112/

Similar Citations

Book Juliette Rigondet; (2019)
Un village pour aliénés tranquilles (/isis/citation/CBB605654043/)

Article Jonathan Andrews; Chris Philo; (2017)
James Frame’s The Philosophy of Insanity (1860) (/isis/citation/CBB313587958/)

Book Miron, Janet; (2011)
Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century (/isis/citation/CBB001200659/)

Book Lukas Engelmann; (2018)
Mapping AIDS: Visual Histories of an Enduring Epidemic (/isis/citation/CBB145222575/)

Article Brodesco, Alberto; (2011)
I've Got You under My Skin: Narratives of the Inner Body in Cinema and Television (/isis/citation/CBB001024830/)

Article Ben Harris; (2017)
Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond (/isis/citation/CBB630387710/)

Article Buda, Octavian; (2010)
The Face of Madness in Romania: The Origin of Psychiatric Photography in Eastern Europe (/isis/citation/CBB001232241/)

Book Jennifer Evans; Ciara Meehan; (2017)
Perceptions of Pregnancy from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (/isis/citation/CBB741421082/)

Article Vera Fusco; Francesca Gollo; Marco Salustri; (2019)
Il Museo Laboratorio della Mente come risorsa per la salute mentale (/isis/citation/CBB096289987/)

Article Carlos Francisco Almeida de Oliveira; Carlos Evandro Martins Eulálio; Viriato Campelo; Paulo Dalgalarrondo; Tom Dening; (2016)
A historiographic study of psychiatric treatments in Brazil: mentalism and organicism from 1830 to 1859 (/isis/citation/CBB284956374/)

Book Sylvelyn Hahner-Rombach; Karen Nolte; (2017)
Patients and Social Practice of Psychiatric Nursing in the 19th and 20th Century (/isis/citation/CBB270047464/)

Authors & Contributors
Picozzi, Mario
Evans, Jennifer
Eulálio, Carlos Evandro Martins
Dobbing, Cara
Meehan, Ciara
Juliette Rigondet
Concepts
Psychiatric hospitals
Mental disorders and diseases
Psychiatry
Doctor-patient relationships
Public understanding of medicine
Patients
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
20th century, early
18th century
Places
Italy
Canada
Scotland
Georgia (U.S.)
Montreal (Quebec, Canada)
Québec (Canada)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment