Assessment | Drawer 02

Date: 09 July 2019 Drawer: 02Number of Photographic Cards: 542Number of Loose Photographs: 60Decades Featured: 1910s-1960sSignificant Characteristics: High number of specimen photographs (grouped together, not as cases); Water damage (sticking photographs)Unique Finds: Oldest date yet found (1911); Full-term infant as ‘specimen’Noteworthy Inscription: “No Name (Anatomy Specimen) Filed in Box Prof Louw’s Research”Time Spent: 3 hrs …

Assessment | Drawer 03

Date: 27 June 2019 Drawer: 03Number of Photographic Cards: 315Number of Loose Photographs: 94Decades Featured: 1920s-1960sSignificant Characteristics: 7 Annotated Envelopes; Free-standing PhotographsUnique Finds: Kodachrome; Histology PhotographNoteworthy Inscription: McManus (as patient, not photographer)Time Spent: Too long Girl, Interrupted Today was a frustrating day, where everything that could go wrong seemed to go wrong. I chose Drawer …

Assessment | Drawer 01

Touching Base It feels blasphemous, somehow unholy, to undo the string wrapped so tightly and for so long around small clumps of cards. Bound loosely together, the cards seem settled – and the idea that I am entering, intervening, and breaking these parcels up troubles me. I am dressed in the safety gear given to …

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 …