Bodies in the psychiatric hospital, the gaze and the camera: from the possibility of representation of madness in the 19th century

Photography for science in the 19th century was understood as the preferred mechanism for capturing reality beyond what the human eye could see. During the process of expansion of the photographic apparatus, the use of photography served multiple purposes: experimental, pedagogical and informative around the new discoveries of science. We are interested in thinking of medical photography as a document that can give an account of the relations between power, discourse and visual culture, proposing its analysis from a critical approach in which the representative character of the image is thought of by virtue of its different dialectics, both on a historical level and in relation to the subject that positions itself in front of it, and in the context of the cultural significance of visual productions.