Many people feel fear or unease when they are in the hands of medical professionals. The condition which had led to the doctor and their hands and eyes on you are impersonal and an invasion of your being. The doctors’ language and their x-rays and scans are of you and are about you but are technical and tied up with the emotion of your condition. They strip your sense of being in control. I have been experimenting with trying to find a way to change how medical imaging is thought of, maybe to bring a sense of comfort to these images, even if they are of painful things, although I am not sure if comfort is the correct word. The aim is to question how we think of medicine and the conventions about being ill. I want to put the real person shown in the medical scans back into the frame.

My proposed project for Photography 3 is an attempt to make use of medical scan images to give the patient behind such scans a voice.

I had a long video chat with tutor about this project. My views of how I think of this work and whether, in trying to express my feelings about my work, I was over long and complex and waffling and whether this project might suffer and be less than it perhaps could be. I questioned how an audience might look at such a difficult and emotionally charged work.

I received a lovely reply which was encouraging and detailed. Here is summary of some points.

• Death, loss, memory, commemoration and representation. The differences and similarities between photographs as documents of a person and medical images that are perceived by contemporary culture not to represent but to dehumanise.
• Images are memory replacement as well as aide-memoires. The notions and fallacies of photography historically and contemporarily.
• The narrativization of the deceased and its link to post-mortem posterity and an enduring afterlife.
• The effect of such a body of work to audiences.
• The ethics of working on death and loss, especially if it also incorporates images other than your own.
• The duality of the photographer as bereaved and the photographer as observer. This is the most potent intersection of research.

This idea of giving the deceased an afterlife and a narrative is something I have thought about. I reviewed an earlier project, which I have reproduced in summary in my ‘Portfolio’ section of this website. I can see that looking back at that work, I was attempting to create that narrative for someone who has no image and little story. Interesting to consider how I might shape that narrative for my Photography 3 work which uses as it’s source material a subject very much closer to my heart than when working with a distant, almost forgotten and ‘dusty’ relative.

Interestingly was that tutor immediately picked up on difficult side of project for me personally but also spoke of my need to do this work and suggested this might become a therapeutic journey.

I was struck with one specific comment that, “Crucially, the photographic medium is inextricably entwined with loss and death from its very beginning. In this way, your idea is also very medium specific“.

One comment I want to make about this blog is that it will not be purely a technical document as it must also contain glimpses of the life which is the heart of the project. I can imagine, this personal side might be at odds with the defined structures of learning but I will make no apology for my approach.