Techniques of Vision

Résumé du livre

This thesis explores how photography has been used in the governing of subjectivitiesand draws on the following three forms of governmentality identified by Michel Foucault: biopower, discipline and ethics. In photography's early history discourses on character and insanity privileged visual observation and the camera was used as a more precise extension of the clinician's eye. With the emergence of Freud's "talking cure" the use of still-photography in treatment and diagnosis was generally neglected until the 1970s when the medium was re-configured as an ideal technique for accessing the unconscious. Currently Phototherapy clients, with the aid of a therapist, use personal photos in order to identify and modify problematic aspects of self. I draw on Michel Foucault's second and third period work in order to investigate these shifting relationships of photography to subjectivity.