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This essay is set in Botswana's cancer ward, where I did ethnographic research on and off between 2006 and 2009. It is a small, open ward of twenty beds located in Botswana's central referral hospital (PMH) in the capital city, Gaborone. There is an outpatient clinic attached to the ward. At the time of my research this was the only cancer ward in the country, which is something of a problem, because there is a very serious cancer epidemic underway across southern Africa. Botswana is a big country with a relatively small population (about two million citizens), but then imagine if there were only one small cancer ward in all of New Mexico or one for New Hampshire and Maine to share.
A cancer ward, unfortunately, provides a critical place to contemplate the force of embodiment in situations of profound existential angst. This essay pursues visually the dynamics by which dying patients inhabit their bodies. I contemplate possible relationships between photographic figuration and the experience of advanced cancers by considering how an objectifying vision, paradoxically enough, might actually facilitate the maintenance of personhood and a sense of the unique self for patients whose bodies are rotting before their eyes. More specifically, I ask: how might a set of highly overdetermined photographs help us understand an epidemic in its most intimate register?
The patient I have in mind is a social person. Any patient in this ward, like patients everywhere, is someone whose personhood is continuously being built, someone who exists by virtue of relationships with others. And yet, this is also a person with a unique self. Dying and processes of bodily disarray highlight the dynamic tensions between the unique self and the social dimensions of personhood. Medical photographs, premised as they are on objectivity, push deep into these tensions.
While I was doing my research, I decided I wasn't prepared to navigate the ethics of photographing patients. I just didn't feel comfortable asking sick people to let me capture their image. And I was uncertain that I had any real use for such pictures, which might actually confuse matters more than illustrate them, so I didn't take any pictures of patients. In fact, I went to great lengths to ensure that patients were not...