The Ethics of Medical Photography Network
This network brings together a multidisciplinary team of historians of photography, medicine and colonialism, philosophers, social scientists, archivists and artistic and documentary photographers in partnership with the Wellcome Collection. Our purpose is to examine how we can display, preserve and write about historical medical photographs in an ethical way.
We’re organising events around three strategic areas: research, collection management and public engagement.
We have three main aims:
to widen access to early medical photographs while protecting both historical subjects and present viewers.
to broaden the range of ethical questions we ask of early medical photographs. We believe that current ethical codes that apply to contemporary medical photographs do not work with historical material. For instance, patients did not consent to have their photographs taken because the concept of “informed consent” did not exist in the nineteenth century.
to challenge the racist, ableist and other damaging legacies of many of these photographs. We believe it is ethically necessary to confront photographic representations that have highly stigmatised certain groups and conditions, for instance children with learning disabilities, and that are still embedded in current collection, cataloguing and classification practices.
If you work in an archive, library or museum and you would like to have a chat about ethical issues that arise from your collections, please don’t hesitate to get in touch! We’re more than happy to have a chat and explore opportunities to collaborate.
To keep up to date with the network’s activities, you can join our mailing list following this link
This network has received funding from the AHRC Research Networking Award from July 2024 until June 2026.
Examples of two network workshops: a collections management workshop at the V&A and a public engagement workshop at the Wellcome Collection.
Medical Photography in Nineteenth Century France
I am currently writing my second monograph, Medical Photography in Nineteenth Century France. From the Material to the Ethical. This book reexamines the early history of medical photography by problematising the very concept of “medical photography”. The uses of photography in medical contexts between 1860 and 1914 were varied and adopted different forms. Taking this multiplicity as a starting point, my book examines how doctors, photographers, patients and other stakeholders used photography in a variety of medical institutions and specialisms, putting ethical questions at the centre of the historical analysis. This re-evaluation of early medical photography is key to understanding the past, the present and the future of medical photography.
This project has received funding from a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (September 2025- August 2024) and British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Grant (“Photography and the Making of Modern Medicine in France (1860-1914)”, Ref: SRG18R1\181193)