Photographing the Emotional Body

Abstract

This chapter examines the medical, chronophotographic, and theatrical photographs taken in the 1890s by Albert Londe, head of the Photographic Service at the Parisian hospital La Salpêtrière. Situating Londe’s production in the broader context of psychological and physiological theories of emotions emerging at the time, this chapter argues that photography became a key tool in the understanding of embodied expressions of emotions. Photographs served scientific and laypeople to grasp the gestures’ meaning, that is, the emotions that they were supposed to communicate, as well as their materiality, the nervous and muscular processes than produced them. This analysis demonstrates that photographic practices became performative practices which articulated emotional bodies.