Where Does it Hurt? Archiving the Body in Pain
Tobin Siebers, recollecting his experience of boarding an aircraft, writes: "he did not want to accept that I was disabled unless my status was validated by a highly visible prop like a wheelchair." Siebers’ account taps into the much-discussed issue of invisible disability, i.e. the inability to distinguish modes of seeing from “objective truth”. In other words, invisible disability exposes our tendency to prioritize the known over the unknown; more importantly, highlights the insistence on corporeal markers of deviance that is innate to anatomical structure. Photography echoes this problem of visuality and extends this desire to ontologise to the very mechanics of language and meaning-making. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes: "by nature, the Photograph (for convenience's sake, let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency) has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe” (5). Like Barthes says, there is something about visuality that necessitates contingency.
I aim to produce a visual archive that consists of medical imaging and self-portraits. My project is interested in the relationship between the visual, the unknown, and the unrecognizable. My chronic illness presented itself through a set of symptoms that could not be traced visually. The X-Rays, MRIs, and other medical imaging often did not align with my experience of pain. My pain, therefore, troubled the epistemic connection that the field of medicine draws between deviance and its presentation in language.