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. The normalcy that my medical reports insisted highlights the incomprehensibility of visuality. The “invisibility” in my illness was not always in opposition to forms of visibility. So, my project is not interested in insisting that my pain is real and true while my imaging is false and incorrect. Instead, it is interested in what D.A Miller calls “semiotic insufficiency”. The photograph as a form allows me to trouble the dialect between seeing and knowing. Photographing the self is a simultaneous process of knowing and also othering. To echo Barthes once again, the body in pain, much like photography, is “an uncertain art”.