The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness, and Healing (review)

Part exhibition catalog, part history of photography, and part primer in the visual culture of public health, The Body at Risk is a majestic, disturbing, and thoroughly riveting collection of illustrated essays that explore the complex relationship between the body as a complex subject of medical discourse and the body as a gripping subject of visual interest. Unlike scholars such as Lisa Cartwright, Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, and José van Dijck, whose works examine sophisticated visualizing technologies as an integral component of contemporary medical culture, Carol Squiers focuses on the joys and sorrows of the analog camera and the profound effect that the medium of photography can have on how we understand sickness and health, thus providing a fresh gloss on the genre of medical photography represented in museum archives and private collections.

Lavishly packaged in an oversized format, The Body at Risk is the product of a fruitful collaboration between the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City and the Milbank Memorial Fund, the venerable philanthropic sponsor for the 2005 exhibition on which the book is based. Squiers, a senior curator at the ICP, has divided the exhibition's images among ten distinct essays that treat individual photographic artists and their subjects as agents of historical change and meaning. The book opens with a reexamination of the haunting work of Lewis Hine, the famous early twentieth-century social-realist photographer whose images of children's and adolescents' bodies broken by the inhumane conditions of industrial labor set the tone for generations of investigative journalists and photo-essayists. Hine's well-known images are followed by a group of much less well-known but no less impressive images taken by Farm Security Administration photographers of public health practitioners at work in the Depression-era United States that promoted health care as an analogue to social reform and virtuous citizenship during the New Deal. To Squiers's credit, the essays that accompany the photographs do a terrific job of providing both historical context and visual analysis, thereby highlighting a dimension of medical history that often receives short shrift: the dual historical significance and iconographic status of images that create and sustain a public sphere of health beyond that which can be conjured by statistics or quantified by clinical-trial reports.

The chapters are arranged chronologically to span the long twentieth century, a smart strategy that highlights the changing technical capacities of the camera as well as the increasing attention paid to medicine as an appropriate subject to be visualized for public consumption. The chapter devoted to David T. Hanson's attempts to document the EPA's efforts to stem the tide of environmental pollution in the 1970s, for example, suggests—and often confirms with painful accuracy—the mutually toxic ecology shared by human bodies and the bodies of water and soil that they occupy. Harrowing documentary sequences captured in the blink of an eye, such as Donna Ferrato's photographs of victims of domestic violence from the 1970s and Eugene Richards's photographs of emergency room medicine from the early 1980s, serve as interventions that are so familiar—in all senses of the word—that their potential intrusiveness is tempered by the sheer political power of their subject matter. Similarly, Gideon Mendel's photojournalistic images of men, women, and children living with HIV and AIDS in Africa direct the viewer's attention to material images of abject suffering that, not unlike Lewis Hine's images of turn-of-the-century tenement dwellers, create an implicit call for social justice even as they document the unimaginable for middle-class viewers watching from a safe distance.