Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography by Christos Lynteris (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography by Christos Lynteris
• Christine Slobogin

Christos Lynteris. Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2022. xviii + 304 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-262-54422-1).

Christos Lynteris's Visual Plague takes a historical-anthropological approach to the visual culture of the third plague pandemic (1894–1959). With this pandemic as his starting point, Lynteris argues that it is not simply a medical photography that defines epidemics but rather "an autonomous genre of visualization: epidemic photography" (p. 1). This extrication of "epidemic photography" from the more [End Page 650] capacious "medical photography" is a necessary and important intervention, as this visual material is different in many ways from the medical photography alternatively called "clinical" photography. Instead of focusing on the "what" of disease, epidemic photography focuses on the "how and why" (p. 5). Lynteris convincingly lays out the myriad definitions and iterations of epidemic photography in this period, showing the crucial role that this emerging visual culture—which depicted neighborhoods, soldiers, patients, or laboratories, among other subjects—played in both public perceptions and scientific understandings of the disease, its effects, and measures taken to stop it.

Lynteris opens by successfully convincing the reader of the importance of his subject matter by placing it in the context of twenty-first-century epidemics and pandemics that have been introduced to and followed by the public via photographs. But Lynteris misses an opportunity in the beginning of this book to engage with twenty-first-century ethical discussions around displaying and circulating historical images of real patients and potentially distressing medical interventions. This ethical grounding is particularly missed in Visual Plague when one turns a page to be confronted with an image of plague-induced necrosis across a patient's face (p. 29) or of corpses in a mass grave (p. 56). Another concern arises with Lynteris's use of the word "coolie" without full contextualization. The reader first encounters this offensive, racialized term in a primary source evidencing Sinophobia (p. 54), but it is used several other times throughout the chapters. While its use may be necessary for Lynteris to write this history, an examination of the origin and meaning of this word would have been welcome early on in Visual Plague to provide reasons for using it and to assure the reader that the racism historically perpetuated by this term is not also perpetuated in this book.

These small but not insignificant qualms aside, the chapters of Visual Plague outline complex ideas clearly, and Lynteris successfully ties longer histories of epidemics, or case studies of doctors or treatments, back to photography and to his main point. There is never a moment when the reader is unclear as to the relevance of an idea, event, or image. Structured thematically, the five chapters are brilliantly organized, with the first focusing on themes of visibility and invisibility and the following four each focusing on a space/object represented prominently in epidemic photography: the city, lazarettos and plague camps, the rat, and the mask. Chapter 1 sets a theoretical foundation, alerting the reader to the complexities of visibility and invisibility that one must grapple with when analyzing images "of" an epidemic. Photography in this period worked between visibility and invisibility to communicate the existential and global threat of disease. The city, and the spectacle of its disinfection, is the photographic focus of chapter 2. This chapter particularly homes in on the photographic relationships between infection and space and between visualizations of "cleansing" and of the racial/class "other." Narrowing down from the city to the quarantine space, chapter 3 ties together two purposes of epidemic photography: framing response to disease as both a technoscientific project and an imperial project. Echoing chapter 1's framing of visibility and invisibility, chapter 4 shows how epidemic photographs formulate the rat as a figure of both certainty and uncertainty: as a solid object known to [End Page 651] carry disease, but with a high level of physical and epidemiological elusiveness. This equated the rat with the pandemic itself, being both visible and invisible. In chapter 5, Lynteris explains how the image of the mask, and therefore the...