Prologue

The Project As a series of disused clinical photographic records, the University of Cape Town (UCT) Department of Surgery’s Collection of 20th Century Clinical Photographs troubles contemporary research principles. Produced by the university’s surgery department between 1920 and 1980, these photographs depict the bodies of patients via various representational modes: frontal and profile images of …

In the Beginning…

Reading and Rambling The project is daunting. I’m no archivist, I’m no ethnographer. Yet here I am archiving, making notes, and doing this self-indulgent thing of recording everything I do – or, at least, what I will be doing. For the moment, the uncertainty means burying myself in literature. Photographic theory, archival organisation, anthropological methods,… …