Abstract
This paper examines how photography shaped the American public’s perception of psychiatric hospitals during the immediate post-WWII period. I will analyze photographs that appeared in popular exposé articles of that period and that used photography as a visual aid for disclosing the poor conditions of state hospitals, intending to promote reform efforts focused on turning antiquated asylums into modern hospitals. Existing scholarship has mentioned how these photographs had a significant influence on shaping the public’s view of asylum conditions. Through a close examination of these photographs, I will argue that they often contained unintentional messages which stigmatized disabled people.
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This research was supported by the Margaret W. Moore and John M. Moore Research Fellowship to fund author’s archival research on the Records of the American Friends Service Committee and the Records of the Center on Conscience and War available at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pensylvania.
Endnotes
1 I use “asylum residents” to describe the patients or inmates of state hospitals. I also use the term “asylum” to describe the publicly-run psychiatric hospitals during the period to stress their function as a custodial-care facility.
2 PM was a short-lived liberal newspaper that existed between 1940 and 1948. Deutsch’s exposé work for PM was later published as a book titled The Shame of the States in 1948.
3 The group of Byberry COs also incorporated the National Mental Health Foundation (NMHF) in 1946, and published Out of Sight, Out of Mind comprised by COs’ testimonials and photographs (Parsons 2018, 27).
4 Smith also reported that the ward contained residents with varying conditions: “Some enough alert mentally so that it is interesting to talk with them and find out about their backgrounds; from others you cannot expect a sensible answer to the questions, ‘Are you cold?’ ‘Do you want something to eat?’” Almost every resident in the building was old, and Smith thought that most of them would die in the hospital.
5 Short TV news programs began after 1947, but they were not as nearly extensive as print media (Kozol 1994, 6).
6 While Life and Look targeted white middle-class readers, Ebony began offering photographic news stories targeting African American middle-class readers in 1945.
7 Folk singer Woody Guthrie’s mother Nora Guthrie was committed to Central State Hospital at Norman for Huntington’s disease. She died in the asylum in June 1930 and buried in an unmarked grave (Cray 2004, 45).
8 In the articles, journalists and doctors laterally advocated such somatic therapies as hydrotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, insulin coma therapy, and others as the effective intervention that could bring asylum residents back to the community. For example, Mike Gorman explained to his readers how modern treatment could be used in order to enable the patient to shake off “his imagined ills and delusions” (Grob 1991, 73; Gorman 1946a, 7–8).
9 In the published content, the juxtaposition of Cooke’s visual rhetoric of social death and cheerful advertisements for consumer goods creates a rather bizarre clash of different forms of visual rhetorics. In the published article, Cooke’s photograph is cropped and drowned in an ocean of consumer goods advertisements such as soda syphons, shoe polish, teething lotion for babies, and “Life-Bra & Life-Girdle.”
10 However, scholars have argued that even the FSA photographic subjects could become “the innocent victim” in the propaganda effort as they could be captured in overly sentimentalized, simplified, and ennobled ways (Stott 1973, 57). Historian Linda Gordon suggests that Lange’s photographic subject in Migrant Mother might have been objectified to fulfill the FSA’s mission: “Is it best to capture a farmworker in her ragged dress so that she will evoke pity and, possibly, help? Or to allow her the opportunity to present herself as she wishes? Does the former make the subject doubly victimized, first by the society and economy, then again by the documentarian?” (Gordon 2010, 242).
11 Roland Barthes theorizes that since the advent of photography, written text has become an auxiliary to the photographic image: “the image no longer illustrates the words; it is now the words which, structurally, are parasitic on the image” (Barthes 1977, 75). In examining Life, Wendy Kozol explains that written text can guide the reader’s interpretation of photographs in a certain direction, but this steering is never done completely: “Photographs are polysemic texts, that is, they are open to different interpretations and can be read in a variety of ways. Captions and other accompanying texts attempt to close or direct interpretations, but never do so completely” (Kozol 1994, 18).
12 Except the African American-run press, the reports made during the period decried the conditions of asylums without invoking race. For example, in asylums where wards were segregated by race, the descriptions of worst wards implied that they were allocated for Black residents (Summers 2019, 229).
13 Gorman become an influential lobbyist, notably working for Mary Laker, who advocated deinstitutionalization. He argued that the arrival of the psychopharmacological solution in the 1950s would help radically reduce the state hospital population (Gorman 1956).
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Tamao, S. Picturing the Institution of Social Death: Visual Rhetorics of Postwar Asylum Exposé Photography. J Med Humanit 43, 639–658 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-021-09723-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-021-09723-0