A launch event of the AHRC Research Network, The Ethics of Medical Photography: Past, Present and Future, has just been announced. The first in a series of online seminars brings together Beatriz Pichel (De Montfort University, project PI), Katherine Rawling (University of Leeds, project Co-I), Toni Hardy (Wellcome Collection) and Andreas Pantazatos (University of Cambridge) to introduce the network and its aims, as well as discuss some of the main ethical dilemmas that historians, heritage specialists and collections managers are facing in relation to medical photography.

About the Network:

This multidisciplinary network brings together historians, ethicists, archivists, heritage scholars, artists, photographers, social scientists, and the public to generate theoretical and practical resources to research, curate, and disseminate historical medical photographs in an ethical way. To balance the ethical needs of heritage institutions, researchers and the public, this network will move beyond the looking/ not looking dilemma [Moeller, 2009] to ask:

  • how does our understanding of the ethics of medical photography, and of medical photography itself, change when we focus on race, disability, gender, class and age rather than consent, privacy and anonymity?
  • how can we widen access to early medical photographs while respecting the dignity of both historical subjects and present viewers?

For any questions about the seminar please contact empnetwork24@gmail.com

You can join the Network mailing list here

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