Paper short abstract:

The paper will demonstrate that the comparison of a clinical framing of photographs with the objections to popular and artistic photography of People with Aids reveals the conflation of disease morphology and patient identity as a characteristic feature of photography both in and outside of the medical realm.

Paper long abstract:

The photography of persons with AIDS (PWA) has been the subject to numerous critiques in relation to the public representation of PWA. Instead of following this line of thought, this paper will follow the clinical value of photography and will raise the question, of how photography contributes to the medical making of AIDS. This paper will therefore adress the photography of PWA, but will focus on clinical photography to contribute both to a broader understanding of visualizations in the production of disease entities and to a positioning of photography in the medical history of AIDS. To differenciate these perspectives, I will engage with the Fleckian term "ways of seeing" to engage with those procedures that make photographs readable and thus disease visible. I will show, that the comparison of a clinical framing of photographs with the objections to popular and artistic photography of PWA reveals the conflation of disease morphology and patient identity as a characteristic feature of photography both in and outside of the medical realm.