Seeing and Reading Historical Images of Insanity

In early January 2010, writes Simon Cross, I will be attending the annual Media Communication and Cultural Studies (MeCCSA) conference to be held this year at the London School of Economics. The annual get together of our subject association is an important opportunity to introduce new research ideas.

For this reason, I will use the MeCCSA conference to introduce an analytic strategy for reading historical images of madness that enables us to see that while forms and figures of madness change there are threads of continuity. My main argument is that we can only understand continuity in the visual image of madness in relation to change. I want to use this argument to show that how continuities and changes are read into historical images of madness depend on three interconnecting factors. They are: media technologies, cultural forms, and historical consciousness.

In the nineteenth century, these factors interconnected in visually significant ways when the development of photography and a changing pictorial aesthetic of madness fused with new theories of mental disorder. Through close analysis of three exemplary, historical forms of representations of madness, i.e. clinical photographs, lithograph engravings, and portraiture in oils, I want to show how they produce certain constructions of madness, with different truth-claims and forms of visual rhetoric being involved, each with attendant consequences for certain historically-based epistemological positions.

Those of you interested in pursuing these ideas more closely might be interested to read my forthcoming book, Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Cultural Representation, to be published Palgrave Macmillan on 1 March 2010.

Mediating Madness

Simon Cross talks about his recent work on how madness is mediated.

Well, I may as well write my first ever blog entry about my new book, Mediating Madness: Mental Distress and Public Representation. Its almost finished – though some wit recently told me that for authors, books are never finished, just abandoned. That seems somehow appropriate not least because there is always something else that you think needs to be said. Anyway, the book is no longer my baby, it has grown and grown, and now needs to stand on its own legs, for better or worse. So, within a month I’ll be delivering the manuscript to Mediating Madness to Palgrave Macmillan. So what topics will the book cover?

The six main chapters range across: The contemporary cultural politics of madness/mental distress (including the question of why I have chosen to retain the 'non-clinical' notion of madness); Reading historical images of madness: change and continuity in the image of madness; Investigative and campaigning journalism and 'suffering images' of mad folk abandoned to their fate in the asylum; The criminally insane and tabloid tales – which includes discussion of the Yorkshire Ripper case; Visualizing madness: mental illness and public representation; and Speaking of Voices: mediating public talk about mental madness and mental distress.

The reader (perhaps you?) will undertake a journey and see how mediations of madness emerge, disappear, and interleave, only to re-emerge at unexpected moments. I’ll post another blog about the book when its about to go to print. I hope you read it. If you do, please let me know what you think!
(Photo credit: howzey. Permissions.)