%0 Journal Article %T Private portraits or suffering on stage: curating clinical photographic collections in the museum context %A Mieneke te Hennepe %D 2016 %V Special Issue: Science Museums and Research %N Spring 2016 %K clinical photography %K Curating %K ethics %K informed consent %K medical photography %K patients %K privacy %K sensitive collections %X Medical photography collections often remind us of the inescapable reality of human suffering and pain, and at the same time they oblige us to deal with questions of ownership and privacy. Medical photography collections are thus considered ‘sensitive’ collections within the museum context. This essay investigates privacy issues involved in the curating of historical photographic collections in museum spaces. When medical photography entered into non-medical domains privacy issues emerged. It is these privacy issues that cast a shadow of sensitivity on the medical material. But the relationship between clinical photograph collections and museums is not as straightforward as it may seem. Personal pictures involve power and privacy, and both aspects play a role in the public display of historical medical photographs, often in unexpected ways. %Z I use the term ‘clinical photograph’ for photographs taken of living patients in medical practices. Medical photography is often used as a broader term, encompassing subjects varying from surgical scenes or specimen photography to group portraits of hospital personnel. A superb publication in the last category is Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880–1930 by John Harley Warner and James M Edmonson, 2009 (Blast Books). %Z Examples vary from War, Art and Surgery: The art of Henry Tonks and Julia Midgley (Hunterian Museum 2014) to A Portrait of Diseases: Photographs from a Hospital in South Africa (Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum, 2003). %Z See, for example, the wonderful Burns Archive in the US, which includes medical images that have been on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d'Orsay. See, for a Dutch example, Kooiker P, Emmerik, O, 1999, Utrechtse Krop, Amsterdam. %Z In the ICOM Code of Ethics collections of human remains and material of sacred significance are defined as ‘Culturally sensitive objects’. See http://icom.museum/the-vision/code-of-ethics/2-museums-that-maintain-collections-hold-them-in-trust-for-the-benefit-of-society-and-its-developme/. %Z This collection was obtained by the Boerhaave Museum in 1986. As I described elsewhere, this collection forms an example of social awareness in medical photography. See Mieneke te Hennepe, 2015, ‘Portraits of Pain: Clinical Photography of Children as a Social Marker’, Depth of Field, 6, 1. http://journal.depthoffield.eu/vol06/nr01/a02/en. %Z On medical portraits of patients see the special issue of Medical Humanities, 2013, 39: 1, in particular the editorial by Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Portraits, patients and practitioners’. %Z See chapter 5 'The Colours of Life' in Mieneke te Hennepe, 2007, Depicting Skin: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Medicine, PhD thesis. %Z Ibid: 'There is a personal flavour about the photograph which is absent in the drawing or the outline, since in these latter forms of representation only the regions necessary to explanation of the facts described need be faithful to the model.' %Z It is not my purpose in this paper to provide a legal history of medical photography. Legal frameworks have local specificities depending on national legislation and national medical regulations or guidelines. %Z See Janet Marstine, 2011, Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics, London %Z See Gazi, A, ‘Exhibition Ethics – An Overview of Major Issues’, Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies, 12, 1: 1–10 %Z Compare chapter 10 in Edwards, E and Mead, C (eds), 2015, Photographs, Museum, Collections: Between Art and Information %Z A newspaper journalist writing about psychiatric photography in the exhibition 'Lichtgevoelig’ in Museum Guislain (Belgium) concluded when thinking about the concept of ‘visual violence’: ‘It makes that you would want to store these photographs forever and close the books’ (vertaling van ‘Het maakt dat je deze foto’s eigenlijk voorgoed zou willen opbergen en deze boeken zou willen sluiten’, Bronwasser, S, 17-02-2015, ‘Te kijk gezet’, Volkskrant. %Z The exhibition was based on a project initiated by Dutch writer Tanny Dobbelaar, see also: Dobbelaar, T, 2015, ‘Skin Stories & Skin Portraits’, European Journal of Life Writing IV: C19–C34. %Z See Woloshyn, T A, 2013, ‘Patients rebuilt: Dr. Auguste Rollier’s heliotherapeutic portraits, c. 1903–1944’, Medical Humanities 39: 38–46 %Z Guest post by Natasha McEnroe on http://light2015.org.uk/the-kiss-of-light-nursing-and-light-therapy-in-20th-century-britain/. See also, Swain, Kelley, ‘Exhibition: Hidden histories of light therapy’ The Lancet, vol. 386: 9995, p 731 %I The Science Museum Group %@ 2054-5770 %B eng %U https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/curating-clinical-photographic-collections/ %J Science Museum Group Journal