#Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond

[sunkentreasurecove]

[dame-de-pique]

Dr Hugh Welch Diamond (1809-1886) - Pevensey Castle, ca.1855

[fiddlesolo]

Patient at Surrey County Asylum photographed by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond. Her name and her reason for admission to the hospital are not known. It was noted that a great deal of the patients admitted during this time period (mid to late 19th century) were women locked away for opposing traditions gender roles or simply disagreeing with their husbands.

my instagram: colorfulhistory

[thinkingimages]

This is Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond's photograph of a young female patient taken during the 1850's in an asylum for the insane. The image, reproduced by Elaine Showalter in "Representing Ophelia," is Plate 32 in The Face of Madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the Origin of Psychiatric Photography, ed. Sander Gilman. The image of the sexually obsessed Ophelia had so thoroughly saturated the popular imagination that the fictional character and the real madwoman had become one, as in this photograph where the young woman has been garlanded in flowers and leaves for her portrait.

"The iconography of the Romantic Ophelia" was so fixed in nineteenth-century culture that, according to Showalter, one way for a young woman to express her psychological anguish was to imitate Ophelia, and "where the women themselves did not willingly throw themselves into Ophelia-like postures, asylum superintendents, armed with the new technology of photography, imposed the costume, gesture, props, and expression of Ophelia upon them" (86). As Oscar Wilde had observed, life imitates art--at least in the incident of this young woman.

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Paula Muhr - Double Flowers

In “Studies on Hysteria”, published together with Freud in 1895, Joseph Breuer called hysterics “the flowers of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as double flowers”. In cultivated flowers, doubling comes from the replacement of the stamens by petals. Like the double flower, the hysteric for Breuer is the product of luxury, and a form of seductive female abnormality. “Double Flowers“ (2010-12) is based on the reinterpretation of medical photographs of “hysterical” women from the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries. The advent of photography played a crucial role in the construction of hysteria as a medical category, as the photographic image provided an apparently objective illustration of the otherwise elusive pathonomic signs of hysteria. The appropriated medical portraits, which aimed at providing pure visibility by immobilising constantly shifting symptoms of female madness, are destabilised in their original function. The historical photographs were taken from various medical publications, where they played the role of unambiguous evidence of illness and abnormality. They were juxtaposed with a number of different objects, plants and animals, which directly refer to Dutch still life paintings and their precisely codified iconography. These assemblages, constructed in the way to emphasise the idiosyncracies of the individual female portraits, were then rephotographed. Each appropriated image was thus deconstructed through the introduction of specific foreign elements, chosen in order to overturn the primary medical mode of the illustrations as portraits of pathology, with which the individual had been turned into nothing more than the bearer of pathonomic symptoms. Through slight transition in symbolic meaning, this work aims to problematise the apparently stable visual boundary established within the medical context between the “normal” viewer and the “pathognomic” patient.

[audientvoid13]

Photographic portrait taken by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of a patient from Surrey County Asylum in England where he worked as a psychiatrist

[fathersonholygore]

Amazon’s Lore Season 1, Episode 3: “Black Stockings” Directed by Thomas J. Wright Written by David Chiu & Patrick Wall

* For a recap & review of the previous episode, “Echoes” – click here * For a recap & review of the next episode, “Passing Notes” – click here June 2009, Ithaca, NY. A couple were running on a wooded path. Suddenly, the husband started believing his wife wasn’t her anymore, that she was an “impostor” who was trying to “destroy him.” He had Capgras Syndrome. He cut his wife’s throat, killing her. Hearing Aaron Mahnke narrate is one thing, hearing the killer himself and seeing his picture is another thing altogether. 100 years before, that wasn’t so crazy, to think somebody could take another’s place. This takes us back to Ireland for another episode of Lore. In 19th century Ireland, “magic and superstition” were often the cause. Specifically, the changelings. We go to 1895, Ballyvadlea, a village in Ireland. Bridget Cleary (Holland Roden) was what you’d call a “modern woman.” She lived with her husband Michael (Cathal Pendred) who worked for the local creamery. She sewed, tailoring clothes that helped she and her husband do better than most in their area. Of course, back then, a woman like Bridget drew rumours. That she was stepping out with another man. Her own husband listened to them, too. But that was no bother, she was her own woman. Michael worries about the changelings, that she’s temping them by going to a place linked with her mother, that they could take her away. Not only that, he’s quite possessive, as men so often get. Also, that’s part of the Irish cultural tradition: a man owned his wife.

However, the changelings are powerful, they can take who they want. Mahnke fills us in about them. Changelings take abducted humans to places where there exists “fairy rings,” or portals, linking the human world to another realm. They can take on the appearance of their target, sending the real person to that realm. All sorts of symptoms could give way to belief that changelings had taken you off. In addition, methods to try figuring out if such was the case. Like holding people over fire, forcing someone to drink foxglove, and other nastiness. And sure as shit, this led to autism, many illnesses mental or otherwise, all becoming reasons to believe the changelings were at work. There’s only 9 days from possession until a person is lost forever to the other realm. Bridget shows up back home to her Michael and her father, Patrick Boland (John Byner), looking sick, falling over. She doesn’t seem to even recognise her husband. When Michael does a quick test with an iron cup, he fears the worst: they’ve got her. So Doc Crean (Darren Darnborough) comes, and other people in the village find out, wondering if a changeling had taken hold of Bridget. Although the doc says “bronchitis and nervous excitement,” others aren’t so sure. Things don’t go too well. Father Ryan (Mark Ashworth) drops by to offer what comfort religion can in times like these. When he does, Michael asks him to bless a bit of medicine from a fairy doctor. The priest tells him to forget the “Old Irishery” and its folklore; all the while peddling Jesus Christ, sort of ironic. Regardless, the husband believes what he believes. You can see where this is headed. It also involves the threat of sensual, powerful, strong women. Mahnke talks about Julia Margaret Cameron, a British photographer who took incredible pictures of women; rare for a woman in 1863. We also see, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond, he took pictures of women, as well. In asylums. Where women could be committed by their husbands, their fathers, the patriarchy who wanted to shut women up. “Moral insanity” a.k.a infidelity was one cause for being committed. Amongst many misogynist reasons. Diamond took pictures believing women seeing themselves in the photographs would have a positive effect. Or maybe it’d only mirror their anxieties.

Lots more superstition surrounding Bridget, driving Michael further into the belief his wife’s been stolen by the changelings. Jack Dunne (Richie Stephens) and the others do nothing to deter that belief. Meanwhile, Bridget’s terrified they’re turning her into a fairy herself. As it is with misogyny, we learn of the man’s prior abusive tendencies, like nearly burning her face with a poker from the fire once. Her husband is sure this is the eighth day, one more to go. What will he do? Oh, you know. “There are no such things as fairies. And if Ireland is ever going to become a part of the world, they need to go away.” The men plan to force feed Bridget a cure. They hold her down, even dear ole dad, and Michael asks the changeling to let his wife free. All gripped by folktales and cultural misogyny. When it won’t work, they decide on using a remedy meant to be used on the verge of day nine. So Bridget pleads with her husband, playing to his superstitious mind, saying anything she can to try thwarting him and the patriarchal plans of the village men. Anything to save herself. Ultimately, day nine came, and Michael had untied her. Father Ryan came around for a bit of mass. They tried relying on faith. Except the husband wasn’t strong enough to have a strong woman such as Bridget as a wife (unlike Annie Oakley, whose husband Frank was beyond loyal to her and proud, too). He couldn’t handle her free spirit. It wasn’t long until he reverted to the superstitions. He beat her, slamming her around the house. Then he lit her on fire in front of everybody, burning her while she was still alive. The Fairy Trial put Michael in the international eye, giving way to ugly Irish stereotypes. “Are you a witch? Or are you a fairy? Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?” Another fantastic slice of Lore! God, they do such justice to Mahnke’s podcast and accentuate the strongest elements of his narration, adding in the scenes, plus those bits of montage from pictures to animations and everything else. One of my favourite new shows. “Passing Notes” is next.

Lore – Season 1, Episode 3: “Black Stockings” Amazon's Lore Season 1, Episode 3: "Black Stockings" Directed by Thomas J. Wright…

[elsaruffieux]

Portrait: Portraiture and the construction of the self

Neil Matheson’s lecture - 06.02.2019

Chap. 4 of Photography the Key Concept by David Bate (really good reference)

Look at: Walter Benjamin’s writing on portrait  Richard Brillant, Portraiture, 1991 John Tagg, Burden of Representation

Physiognomy: How we read faces

Portraits give us informations on a person we wouldn’t have without it, it tell us exactly what a person looks like. In painting, the genre moves away from the exact representation that became possible with the invention of photography. A good example of that is Picasso and his abstract portraits of women which often tell us more about the painter than the sitter himself. A photograph is seen as a light index of a person which makes it much closer to reality than painting.

Until photography’s invention, very few people had representation of themselves. Portrait has also been used as a way to categories the different form of insanity by someone called Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond. He thought that he could categories mental illness through faces.

Painting also developed a sort of rhetoric of representation by categorising the character type. To do so, they used animals’ faces. 

Portrait studio became one of the main uses of portraiture. it became a way to perform or create a sort of identity.

Left Image: Thomas Ruff, Portrait (stoya), 1986 Right Image: Richard Avedon, George H. W. Bush, Director, CIA, Langley, Virgina, March 2 1976

Photographer Thomas Ruff created a series of well-known images using this standard way of shooting passport photo only he printed them extremely big to questioned the identity of his subjects.

Richard Avedon is a good example of being a photographer creating portraits that are more about himself than his models. He shoots all is work the same way, using a white background, outside with the available light.

3 distinct keys to create a interesting portrait

I could add staged scenario to this diagram but I thought it wasn’t really an essential part of portraiture.

Roland Barthes wrote about posing in his book Camera Lucinda:

“Once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing”, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.”                                                              R. Barthes, Camera Lucinda, 1982, p.10

Top left: Juno Calypso, The Honeymoon, 2016 Bottom left: Lise Sarfati, The new life/ La vie nouvelle, 2005 Right: August Sander, Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne, 1930

[halftoness]

photographic representation - beyond realism and conventionalism

founded in rochester, ny, spiritualism saw its rise in america the early 1860s and spread to europe in the mid-1870s and again in the 1890s. although most “spirit” photographers were fraudulent, a large audience of predisposed believers was created. as fraudulent as they were, spirit photographs encouraged experimentation with multiple exposures and acceptance to the deception style.

along with spiritualism, positivism, put forth by auguste comte, was another photographic movement in the late 1800s. positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes metaphysical speculations. this theory states that human knowledge is dependent on precise ordered observation, classification, and comparison. this theory provided the foundation for the realist movement. art photography embraced the values of metaphysical idealisms rather than those of realism or positivism. the theory of positivism was applied in social institutions, like law enforcement and hospitals. photographs started to be used as courtroom evidence which inspired dr. hugh welch diamond to make portraits of his patients. he claimed clinical photography aided treatment and provided a record for medical guidance.  

the topic of positivism in photography is extremely interesting to me. unfortunately, i couldn't find much on the influence positivism had on the medium. regardless, i think the movement caused photographers and non-photographs to see photography in a more practical sense. photographs are an extremely important part of law enforcement and courtroom proceedings and using photography in a medical sense has been almost revolutionary to the practice. although it is still up for debate, i think photography plays an extremely important role in society and will continue to grow and incite change in other fields.

[ceciliataormina-mp]

BA (HONS) PHOTOGRAPHY

MS. CECILIA TAORMINA

2020

Photography in Art therapy

The evolution of an era.

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By Cecilia Taormina

INTRODUCTION

In this dissertation we are going to discuss about how photography has been embraced by the therapeutic field over the last 50 years. We are going to look closely at the beginning of this practice, exploring how it developed and why it became so important but yet so underrated. We are going to see how photography can help people in dealing with mental health issues and to search and install a deeper connection within ourselves.

Need to expand on argument and method before going on to set out chapter structure

Divided in three chapters, in the first we are going to look at the history of the PhotoTherapeutic techniques and their pioneers, understanding the terminology and having a look at different case studies. We are also going to understand the importance of the family album that, moving forward into the second chapter, will create a base to comprehend the practice of the photographer Jo Spence and her work around self portraits. We will discover her journey as a self taught photographer and how and why, later on in her life, she found herself making use of photography in a therapeutic way. We will discover the differences of the group and the one-to-one dynamics during art therapy workshops and, thanks to the study of Victor Burgin’s theories, we will understand how politics had such a huge impact on Spence’s work production. In the third chapter we will instead analyze how photography can be used in a military environment to give voice to the veterans suffering from PTSD after the war. The project of the photojournalist Lynn Johnson “Blast Force” will give us a different perspective about how the same tool can be used in a different context, maintaining the same aim. We will compare her crafts with the post WW1 nurses’ practice of facial reconstruction to veterans, with visible facial damages, before going back home to their families.

In the conclusion, we will re-examine the case studies and thesis to argue whether or not photography could actually be more useful if well used in different contexts.

All needs textual support from the outset.

Chapter 1. Judy Weiser and PhotoTherapy techniques.

As prior mentioned, in this first chapter we are going to discuss about the historical journey of phototherapy and how it evolved to become as known as now around the globe.

Before starting to go deeper into the topic, it is better to explain what it is intended by Phototherapy and what is the history behind it.

“Phototherapy is a discipline within mental health which uses photography to help clients coming to terms with any problems they might have. In its lighter version it’s a tool for self exploration and self-discovery. With Phototherapy a person can explore different parts of their personality and bring them up to the surface if they are not normally visible in their everyday life.” (Lietta Granato, 2011)

The first mention of the use of photography in a therapeutic environment is dated 1856 by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond (1809 – June 21, 1886). Born in Kent, Diamond was a British photographer who made use of photography for medical purposes. He believed that the patient’s mental state was manifested in her facial features. For him then, as long as illness and physiognomy were connected, therefore through the use of photography the phenomenon could have been watched closely to help diagnose the disorder. From 1848 to 1856 his job as a Superintendent of the Female Department at the Surrey County Asylum helped him to lead his research forward, taking portraits of the patients in front of a conventional plain background. Through the analysis of the pictures, he conveyed that the scientific connection was visible and in 1856 he submitted the pictures to the Medical Journal and a paper of the research to the Royal Society of Medicine. People did not really know how to react, due to the fact that the portraits were neither pure art or science products. Despite his attempts, the practical results of this photo-therapy practice are unknown (The J Getty Museum, date unknown).

Need to use quotes from Diamond to explain his method as basis of phototherapy.

There’s rather a leap to the following section of the argument – if there’s nothing available of phototherapy during that long period, you need to at least introduce the ‘therapy’ aspect – probably psychotherapy or psychoanalysis (?) if this is the approach that you are going to take up in Weiser’s work. Needs some explanation of what such therapy actually entails and how it functions.

Over the next 100 years people from different parts of the globe, if working with photographic material during therapeutic sessions, did not have any way to know about other practitioners' existence, until a brief article changed the perception of people’s evolution of photography in the medical field. Thanks to an article published in Psychology Today in 1977, a whole community of phototherapy practitioners began to grow and to get to know each other. The article (Author unknown) talked about a research conducted by the clinical therapist Brian Zakem from Chicago. His case study was focused on two clients of the Ravenswood Hospital Mental Health Center who both gained positive life improvement during therapy throughout the use of photography (Author Unknown, 1977).

The first patient described is Alan -a man of 32 years old, diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic- who has been on and off psychiatric supervision for nine years. Unable to emotionally detach himself from his mother to look for a place where to leave alone to, through the analysis of pictures he brought during phototherapy sessions he recognised the reason of his issues. The pictures, taken from the family album, were a collection of portraits of dead male relatives -such as the father and the grandfather- acknowledged by Alan as both very important figures of his youth. The pictures were memories of love and loss, that were able to bring back his old feelings of rage and abandonment. Thanks to this discovery, his therapeutic journey took an important turn; he understood that he needed to be able to deal with their death in order to make peace with himself and to move out. In fact, as a result at the end of the treatment, he managed to get a full-time job and to leave home.

The second patient’ story is about Wilma - a woman of 65 years old diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive personality and suffering from depression- who was treated at the Day Hospital along with her other two sisters. During their therapeutic journey, Wilma’s therapist asked her to bring along her family album to have a look at it together. Wilma became involved into her past activities and told the therapist the story of each of the pictures, along with the sisters. Thanks to that immersion, during three sessions Wilma started to remember the times where she was feeling good and when she was active in the community. This process brought her to take a step forward to gain her life back, starting to do volunteering job, being involved in family activities and being an active member of the church. The depression was slowly disappearing and she ended up seeing the psychiatrist only once a month, carrying on with the activities alone.

The article was then declaringdeclared the importance of photography in a mental health environment, demonstrating how people would feel more open to discuss certain feelings and issues if looking at a picture, whether in another contest where only words might be used they would feel uncomfortable and, therefore, hesitate (Author Unknown, 1977). At the end of the article, the doctor was inviting people to contact him if they were using similar techniques in mental health, to have an open discussion and perhaps collaborate. After the publication, over 200 people contacted the doctor and this resulted in the formation of a new periodical called Photo Therapy Quarterly newspaper. Thanks to this new publication, people were able to be updated about new techniques, the results of experiments and the patients’ outcomes (Author Unknown, 1977) It was also a great way for other phototherapy practitioners of the United States -especially the ones operating in North America- to acknowledge each other's existence and to start to collaborate.

Meanwhile, in the year 1973 in Canada, Vancouver, something more concrete was happening. The psychologist Judy Weiser (unknown) starteds to use photography during counselling sessions with deaf native children. In 1975 she publisheds an article entitled “Phototherapy in mental health - Using Photographs in Therapy with People Who are ‘Different’” about how this technique so called phototherapy -appeared in 1857- if well developed could be beneficial for therapists and clients to “access to previously blocked areas of feelings, thoughts, attitudes, memories, etc. that had been otherwise unavailable through ordinary verbal means of counseling“ (Weiser, 1975). In her opinion and point of view, as long as there is no wrong way of experiencing a photograph, a therapist could use pictures to get a better understanding of the client’s feelings and social and/or mental issues. As an example, she presents a case study of a deaf child called Debbie of 13 years old. During the therapy sessions together they were using sign language and images combined together to explore the relationship the child had with her mother. Thanks to the use of photographs Weiser had the chance to see the world through Debbie’s eyes without any interference -sign language wise and communicative- from her. During this therapeutic journey they explored together the identity of the child, creating a family album where the little girl could use as a personal reference to review moments, feelings and people of her daily life. This process thought Judy Weiser that “a person of any age will be much less defensive discussing a neutral object such a photograph, while leaving themselves somewhat protected until feeling comfortable enough to be a bit more vulnerable in discussing more personal things” (Weiser, 1975)

Thanks to this study she challenges the idea that therapists, in order to do a better job, should be trained to learn how to read photographs, how to ask the proper questions and how to deal with the clients’ response. We could argue about how the theories could have been considered very avant-guard during that specific time frame, where photography was growing in importance and social use. For this reason, it is important to have a look at how the photographic approach through therapy was being embraced by the rest of the world.

Giving the fact that technology such as internet, google search or social media was not existing at that stage, the only way people could have acknowledged the existence of other practitioners and studies carried on in the rest of the country was throughout the reading of journals and magazines dedicated to the topics. During the following years lots of changes happened around the idea of photography and its use in a therapeutic context. Writers, scientists and psychologists were writing books and organising conferences around the United States to allow people interested in the topic to meet up and get to know other practitioners such as educators, therapists, doctors and other professionals. These conferences were also instructional regarding teaching the audience how to make use of special techniques to improve their practice. For decades these workshops took place in North Aamerica - “The first Educational Workshops taught about PhotoTherapy techniques began in 1975 in Canada (taught by Weiser). [...] The first PhotoTherapy Workshop taught in Europe (by Weiser) happened in Leeuwarden, Netherlands in 1990. And the first "6-day Intensive Training in Judy Weiser's PhotoTherapy Techniques" Workshop happened in Canada in 1984” (Weiser, 2011). Unfortunately, as long as not everyone was able to afford a ticket for U.S. to attend a conference or a workshop, people were trying to rely on books to manage to grasp the basics of the techniques and to use them in their practice. The limit to this approach was put by the information the books were filled up with. Readers would most definitely find examples of clinical application of the procedure, but a huge lack of hands-on information about how they could start to perform the techniques themselves. For this issue to be solved we have to wait the year 1993 to see a publication from Judy Weiser coming out on the market. Presenting photo illustrated cases and photo-interactive assignments to be practiced by yourself, “Phototherapy techniques: Exploring the Secrets of Personal Snapshots and Family Albums” had the aim to fill the gap of knowledge in the literature, showing a more practical-focused approach where questions such as “what, why and how” were being answered. Organised in chapters -one for each technique, fully explained and with lots of examples given- the book reached such a huge success that brought Judy Weiser to be considered the main pioneer of the Phototherapy practice. This book was considered one of the most important texts to use by teachers and educators to explain and teach the right approach in contexts such as University lecturers and Art therapy courses (Weiser, 2011).

For Weiser the purpose of this book is primarily to make sure that the reader would get a sense of what the meaning of PhotoTherapy is and what it could be used for. Going against the general belief and “artistic habit” of that era -think about Cindy Sherman, William Klein, Robert Frank or William Eggleston- where the research of the aesthetic eye-catchy style was a must and the way of framing was important, even if and when the photographic style was different from one photographer to another, she argues the importance of the aesthetic of the pictures, affirming that any picture can be used - DVD, digital images, prints, photocopies are also included under the umbrella of variety of choices people have- as a “mirror with memory” (Weiser, 1993). It does not matter how it looks like aesthetically, as long as it has a story behind that the viewer is able to respond to and the photographer is able to tell about or, better saying, to remember. “The actual meaning of any photograph lies less in its visual facts and more in what these details evoke inside the mind (and heart) of each viewer. While looking at a snapshot, people actually spontaneously create the meaning that they think is coming from that photo itself, and this may or may not be the meaning that the photographer originally intended to convey” (Weiser, 1993). The emotional response to the pictures of course is not the same for every viewer; the intensity of it, the connection and the engagement with the image are dependent entirely to the unique life experience of the viewer (Weiser, 2013). This process can be used from the therapist to allow the patient to discover something more about themselves. Looking at pictures of the past such as the ones contained in the family album and talking about the feelings related to the memories that those bring back to life, the patient would be able to connect with feelings they might have buried over time or long forgotten. The therapist then has to be trained to ask the right questions to be able to create a bridge between visual association and emotional response to memories, people and places.

According to the author, there are five types of PhotoTherapy techniques existing. All of them have to work together to assure the best emotional outcome. She compares them to the fingers of a hand, thanks to what, if one is missing, the rest do not operate as their best (Weiser, 2013)

This all relies rather too heavily on Weiser – and on a very limited sample of her writing. I’d suggest using a wider range of research sources and better referencing the discussion.

There’s also no use of actual visual examples in demonstrating this how this model of phototherapy actually functions – it really needs some engagement with and analysis of actual images used in phototherapy, or it all remains on a rather vague and somewhat abstract level.

The photographs, she states, offer to the therapist a series of accessible non-verbal codes about the patient’s values, habits, beliefs, ambitions etc. These codes are the keys to better understand how the person perceives the world. “What for photographers is usually an end-point (the finished photo) is, for PhotoTherapy purposes, just the beginning..” (Weiser, 1993).

But with the help of what kind of pictures would the therapist be able to see the world through the client’s eyes? The five fingers previous mentioned are as follows:

1) Photos which have been taken or created by the client: in this category fall all the pictures the client has been taking until that time. These include constructed pictures, collages, postcards or the ones that have been actually shot by using the camera.

2) Photos which have been taken of the client by other people: These pictures can be constructed -in matters of posing, choosing the location or the clothing- or contrary where the person is not aware of the picture being taken. Therefore they look more natural, perhaps not looking at the camera at all.

3) Self-portraits, which means any kind of photos that clients have made of themselves, either literally or metaphorically: For example in this categories can fall what we are nowadays use to call selfies, where we decide the position of the camera, the facial expression, the choice of our facial side etc. In other words, the pictures of ourselves where we have total control of every detail.

4) Family album and other photo-biographical collections: The pictures included in this category are part of a broader umbrella of facts. These are the pictures we decide to choose, to hold inside a photographic album -these images are to keep private, dedicated to the family members and meant to be seen by relatives and people we feel close to- hidden from strangers. Or, on the contrary, these could be the pictures we proudly show off hanging them on the wall for everyone to see them. Nowadays this category is related also to family pictures shared on social media.

5)"Photo-Projectives": This technique is peculiar because it is not based on any visual reproduction of the person’s appearance at any stage of their life. Instead it “make use of the (phenomenological) fact that the meaning of any photo is primarily created by its viewer during their process of perceiving it. Looking at any kind of photographic image produces perceptions and reactions that are projected from that viewer's own inner map of reality which determines how they make sense of what they see” (Weiser, 1993)

The idea of these techniques is to establish a research path that is guided and constructed entirely by the client. The job of the therapist it is therefore to find the answers to these questions: “Who is my client?”, “Who who is my client in the context of a group of family and in the context of friends?”, “What is their background?” (Weiser, 2013). The intimate relationship began between client and therapist then should bring up a conversation aimed at creating this abstract idea of the persona the therapist has in front of him.

“Since PhotoTherapy involves people interacting with their own unique visual constructions of reality (using photography more as an activating verb than as a passive/reflective noun), these techniques can be particularly successful with people for whom verbal communication is physically, mentally, or emotionally limited, socioculturally marginalized, or situationally inappropriate due to misunderstanding of nonverbal cues. And, since PhotoTherapy is about photography-as-communication rather than photography-as-art, no prior experience with cameras is required for effective therapeutic use” (Weiser, 1993).

Even though until now we have explored what in 1993 was defined and already established as PhotoTherapy by the main pioneers of the movement, Weiser later put the attention to the words we use to define this process. Similar in terminology but different in meaning, what so called Therapeutic Photography is for Weiser something controversial. The term ‘Therapeutic Photography’ generally indicates the use of images as healing tools in a healing context where there are no qualified therapists. In fact Judy Weiser reinforces this distinction by using the following definitions:

Phototherapy = Photography DURING therapy, Therapeutic Photography = Photography AS therapy. (Weiser:2011)

In the next chapter we are going to understand better what Therapeutic Photography has been used over the years by artists such as Jo Spence, Terry Dennett and Rosy Martin to deal with personal issues and go through a journey of self-discovery. – do they actually use that term themselves?

Overall, in conclusion we can acknowledge the fact that over the years photography and therapy have grown together, getting in a close relationship and partnership, serving the mental health professionals to do a better job. We learned that photos are footprints of our mind leaving traces not only where we have been but also where we are about to be going next, even if we may not have realised it yet. Photography has taken a different turn, where does not serve the aesthetic world but actually it is way far away from it.

“Doing good therapy, and doing it well, is itself an art, and one which needs as many intervention tools as possible for helping a client in the most beneficial way…”

(Weiser, 2011)

General comments:

This is coming together now, though there is still scope here to further reinforce the argument and the quality of the academic support for that argument.

The main issue here is with the quality and range of the sources used. It relies rather heavily on a rather limited range of Weiser’s writing and is not fully referenced – there are no page numbers here. There’s also some reliance on an anonymous source. I would suggest that you try to further develop the range of sources – and particularly credible academic sources – used to support the discussion.

The referencing system needs standardising using one single referencing format and full references are required i.e. including page numbers for textual sources.

There are also no images here, such that the discussion can seem rather abstract at times. I would recommend the inclusion of some indicative imagery and maybe some case studies that demonstrate how this functions in practice.

You could also further polish some of the writing and formatting (use of italics etc.) in places.

[lepromatosis]

“From 1848 to 1858 Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond [pictured at top] made photographs to document the facial expressions of patients suffering from mental disorders at the Surrey County Asylum in England where he was superintendent of the female department. He believed that a patient's mental state was manifested in her physiognomy, or facial features, and he claimed to use these photographs to help diagnose the disorders.“ - Getty Museum

[capturingmaya]

Lecture theatre.1 Neil

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Artists

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Julian Margaret Cameron, sir JOHN Herschel 1867

•Dr Hugh Welch Diamond, seated women with a bird,ca.1855.

•Walker Evans penny picture display savannah Georgia 1936.

•Thomas ruff portrait 1988

- Convention on a industrialised image but he has blown his portraits to a massive scale and this splits the way you perceive these images. The detail becalmed overwhelming and you become to wonder why the simple details in the portraits were so interesting and why viewers enjoyed the challenge of understanding the photograph.

•Richard Acrdon, Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, Davis , California, May 9 1981. -His work argues that portraits are not just about he sitter but also about the artists... their style, their perception, etc.

•Dianne Arby’s woman with a veil on 5th Avenue NYC, 1968.

-Genuine smile, not typical but Arby’s uses this to his advantage to create a contrast in concept as he shows very harsh but truthful portraits, portraying all flaws instead of flattering the sitter and complementing the smile- following his own agenda.

•Philip-Lorca diCorcia, From the heads Series 1999-2001.

•Shizuoka Yokomizo dear stranger.

-Creates a tense power dynamics, as there is an idea of an encounter between the subject and the photographer, even without any verbal communication. Yokomizo, approaches subjects by posting letters explaining interest in photographing them through their window; giving them a certain time to shoot and giving them a time frame to shot allowed Yokomizo to communicate a connection to the subject.

•Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Set #16 1978

•Claude Cajun, self portrait, ca.1921-29

-Preforming act for femininity, acting as a social front for a social role.

-• Gillian Wearing self portrait of me in a mask 2011

•Juno Calypso, what to do with a million years 2018

•Mari Katayama, Broken heart exhibition at white rainbow 2019

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Staged scenarios-

———

•Lisa Safarti, the new life/ la vie nouvelle, 2005

-book series ‘she’ 2012

-Portrays dreams/aspirations by the mundane setups and creations of what could be. Moments of reflection or interiority coming into the photography,

•Katy Grannan anonymous, from the ninety nine series.

•Alec Soth, vas’s, Minnesota, 2002 from sleeping by the Mississippi.

•Jamie Hawkesworth, from Preston bus station

-Nothing inside- idea of nothing inside

•Hans Bellmer, la poupee 1934

•Hiroshi Sugumoto

•Valerie Bellin, untitled from the series mannequins,2003.

•Maija Tammi, one of them is a human 2016

————

Quotes

————

Richard brilliant

‘Art works, intentionally made of living or once living people by artists, in a variety of media, and for an audience’.

-Richard Brilliant, portraiture, London:

Reaktion,1991,

Claud Cahun

‘Under this mask,another mask. I’ll never stop removing all these faces.’

———-

Notes

———-

Photographing portraits; consider How viewers perceive the Individual and how photographers portray them (conceptual debates on topics relating to subject such as gender should relate to composition)

-Portraiture used for physiology in the 19th century.

-In a sense democratised the photograph....

VIDEO 2 WATCH- CINEMATOGRAPHY

-The passion of Joan of Arc, de Carl Theodor Dreyer 1928

~~The Harward GALLERY~~

~~ WHITE RAINBOW GALLERY ~~

~~Sunset house GALLERY~~

HAnna moon and voice

Insomnia portrait (Flemings)

[biofunmy]

As Men Are Canceled, So Too Their Magazine Subscriptions

Imagine if Kodak had answered the threat of digital photography by pivoting from film to outdoor grills.

Imagine if Blockbuster had taken on the challenge from Netflix by shifting from DVDs to fast food.

Imagine if men’s magazines stared down the post-#MeToo manpocalypse by disowning men.

Maybe the last one isn’t so hypothetical?

At a time when calls are growing for the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys to follow the Grammys and the MTV Video Music Awards in erasing gendered categories, and to do away with gender-specific magazines, bro bibles like GQ, Esquire and Playboy seem poised to do a backpedal of Michael Jackson moonwalk proportions from the formula that kept them perched at the publishing pinnacle for a half-century.

Namely, being a print version of your father, offering up bourbon-breathed tutorials on the arts of tie knotting, fly casting, and skirt chasing.

In the gender tornado of 2019, men’s magazines, it seems, are canceling themselves. (The internet’s assault on glossy print isn’t helping either.)

“How do you make a so-called men’s magazine in the thick of what has justifiably become the Shut Up and Listen moment?” wrote Will Welch, the editor of GQ, in a cri de coeur introduction to this month’s “New Masculinity” issue. “One way we’ve addressed it,” he continued, “is by making a magazine that isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all.

So gender fluid it’s soggy, the 128-page issue might well have been themed “No Masculinity,” with its androgynous cover image of Pharrell Williams looking like an inverted tulip in a floor-length yellow Moncler Pierpaolo Piccioli coat, followed by ruminations on the “weaponized” male body by Thomas Page McBee, a transgender writer and boxer; a defense of makeup for men by EJ Johnson, Magic Johnson’s son whose fashion tastes run toward fur shawls and diamond chokers; and a debunking of the power of testosterone itself by Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and author.

Such untraditional content is a survival strategy for glossies with a Y chromosome tilt in this homo novus era, where every reference to masculinity wears an implied “toxic” like a hair shirt.

Even Playboy, mired in identity crisis since dial-up modems, is suddenly woke.

The magazine has rechristened its Bunnies as “brand ambassadors,” and even embarked on a short-lived experiment to cut out the nudes. After the death of its founder Hugh Hefner in 2017, Playboy has morphed into an art-book quarterly that ditched its old tee-hee-hee motto, “Entertainment for Men,” for a gender-blinkered “Entertainment for All.”

It’s an open question whether the men who now turn to Pornhub and its ilk for the kind of “entertainment” that Playboy built an empire on even noticed.

Even so, the magazine, which long held up Hef, with his phallic-symbol pipe and star-studded skin romps at the Playboy Mansion, as the epitome of American straight male aspiration, is turning the brand’s hyper-male, hyper-hetero legacy on its head.

The magazine’s new leadership team consists of a gay man (the executive editor Shane Singh) and two women (the creative director Erica Loewy and Anna Wilson, who is in charge of photography and multimedia), all millennials.

Recent feature articles include profiles of Andrea Drummer, a female African-American chef who runs a cannabis-centric restaurant in Los Angeles, and King Princess, a genderqueer pop singer who is as a symbol of self-acceptance to young L.G.B.T.Q. fans.

For a cover image this summer, the team commissioned the fine-art photographer Ed Freeman (a rare man who still shoots for Playboy, though he is gay) for an arty underwater shot featuring three featuring female activists for causes like ocean conservation and H.I.V. awareness.

“The water,” Mr. Singh explained to Jessica Bennett of The New York Times for an article in August, “is meant to represent gender and sexual fluidity.”

Change is also afoot at Esquire, the tweediest of the men’s titles, which for decades carried a whiff of dad’s old cedar chest full of pocketknives and Mickey Mantle baseball cards.

This past June, the magazine installed its second editor, Michael Sebastian, in three years. Mr. Sebastian, 39, made his name as Esquire’s digital director, where he oversaw a significant rise in traffic to the site, according to Hearst.

His appointment as editor prompted industry speculation that he was going to go “full Cosmo,” chasing Instagram-friendly content and trending topics on Twitter just like Cosmopolitan, Esquire’s sister publication at Hearst that has lately been pursuing data as hotly as it long proselytized multiple orgasms.

The move seemed symbolic. Mr. Sebastian replaced Jay Fielden, a dapper Texan given to Hemingway and Cifonelli suits, who had departed weeks before, citing the lure of new (and unspecified) possibilities. Mr. Fielden had vowed to revive the “literary charisma” of the magazine of Fitzgerald and Dos Passos. He may have fit the image of the “Esquire man” too well for the times.

In one of his first interviews after he got the job, Mr. Sebastian took a swipe at the publishing patriarchy, telling The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to get away from the idea “that both the Esquire reader and writer is a middle-age white guy who likes brown liquor and brown leather.”

In fairness to Mr. Fielden, he said pretty much the same thing years ago, before Harvey Weinstein and his ilk sent half the population to the penalty box. “There’s no cigar smoke wafting through the pages,” he said to The New York Times in 2017, “and the obligatory three B’s are gone, too — brown liquor, boxing and bullfighting.”

As the same article reported, Mr. Fielden had won the job in part because he courted more male readers to the traditionally feminine Town & Country, the Hearst title he headed before Esquire.

At Esquire, he vowed to lure more female readers and ditched boys’ club staples like the print version of the “Women We Love” issue.

Apparently, it was not enough. Could anything be? Perhaps not, as manhood itself is being interrogated, scrutinized and radically revised.

The very idea of a men’s magazine now sounds “as hopelessly passé as a private gentlemen’s club,” according to a recent article, “The End of Men’s Magazines,” in City Journal, which is not exactly a progressive organ (the magazine is published by the Manhattan Institute, a free-market think tank).

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Details is done. Maxim has evolved its identity from a frat-house must-read to a cosmopolitan lifestyle magazine, an about-face that began under a female editor and fashion veteran, Kate Lanphear, who departed in 2015.

But Esquire has already survived the Great Depression, World War II, disco, yuppies and the dot-com bust. It’s still here.

And plenty of readers are still here, too, even in a brutal publishing climate that has forced august women’s titles like Glamour, Seventeen, Self, and Redbook to retreat from print for the web.

Despite a plunge in newsstand sales that has plagued the whole industry, Esquire still had an estimated total average circulation of 709,000 for the first six months of this year, according to the Alliance for Audited Media; the figure accounts for both print and digital subscriptions as well as single-copy sales.

GQ, too, is a long, long way from life support, with a figure of 934,000 for the same period, according to the alliance.

Times change, sometimes violently. But recent history is full of apparent anachronisms (gas guzzlers, Birkenstocks, Donald Trump) that managed an unlikely second act. And men’s magazines have proven pretty adept at sniffing out the shifts in culture, both trivial and seismic, over the decades — which is one reason they have been around for decades.

Esquire may have swaggered into the 1960s as the Don Draper of magazines, but as the old order began to crumble thanks to Betty Friedan, the Black Panthers and many others, the magazine’s editor, Harold Hayes, quickly detoured into a flower-power-era version of woke.

He commissioned Susan Sontag’s dispatch from Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War, and James Baldwin’s ruminations on race in America after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Even Playboy opened its pages to thought-provoking interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X and Fidel Castro while sprinkling in at least a few pictorials featuring Playmates of color.

Yes, that was a different time. We’ve come a long way from Gloria Steinem decrying “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed” thanks to the Pill in Esquire in 1962, to Hannah Gadsby, a lesbian comedian, taking aim at “hypermasculine man-babies” in GQ’s “New Masculinity” issue.

Haven’t we?

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[scorpiostellium]

👁‍🗨 Edited by @part_of_destruction Photography by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond Open access (à Sick Minded)

[chapterlilaria]

Photos From A Vintage Victorian Mental Asylum

“It was a house for those who could not take care of themselves, for those who heard voices, who had strange thoughts and did strange things. The house was meant to keep them in. Once they came, they never left.” ― Madeleine Roux, Asylum (more…)

[kairosgrzincic]

Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond Woman Holding a Dead Bird, Surrey County Asylum c. 1855

[fathyelsherif]

Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond 1809 – 1886 (some of the oldest portraits.. for documenting mental patients)