Homecoming

A Quick Catch-up 3 months, 12 drawers, over 5000 photographic cards – this was the UCT Collection that I assessed between June and August 2019. Only a short month later I was on a plane to Manchester, to begin my PhD at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM). Here I …

Surveying

The Literature Review. That is how every PhD (both good and bad) begins. Apparently what it takes is sifting through copious amounts of books and articles – some in physical form, most as digital documents, some legally obtained, others less so. Highlighting, taking notes, writing summaries… all to find that a day’s work will only …

A Virtual Return

It’s been two months since my last entry. Or confession. I’m not sure which. Since then, I have moved to Manchester (UK not US) in a furious attempt to make something of this project and myself. In a week the research done to date on the UCT Collection will be presented at the St Andrews …

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,… …