Sick In Bed

Sick in Bed is a collection of vernacular photographs, that questions the photographic gaze and unequal power dynamics between the photographer and his or her subject when the person photographed is a woman or girl confined to bed.

Sick in Bed

 The writer Katherine Byrne describes; Invalidism became a way of life for women because it was a means of demonstrating the most desirable of female characteristics, namely purity, passivity, and a willingness to sacrifice oneself for others, especially men. 

Sick in Bed is a collection of vernacular photographs, that questions the photographic gaze.

I examine the unequal power dynamics between the photographer and his or her subject, especially when the person photographed is a woman with disabilities and health problems that have confined her to her bed.

“When my daughter Mimi turned 20, she developed a disability. I started taking pictures of her, but it was painful because I felt like I was becoming complicit in the general voyeurism towards people with disabilities,” explains the London photographer. Through portraits of anonyms, I reconnect with the experience lived with my daughter: the confrontation of an uncomfortable photographic voyeurism and vulnerable patients, deprived of agency.

Thus, the point is to reveal the visual impulse that puts into tension the viewer and the suffering, gendered and objectifiable, bedridden body. The accumulation of photographs reveals the spectatorial device that encloses the subject in a frozen setting, while dramatizing the illness and conditioning our gaze. The images say nothing about the knowledge of the bedridden people: the unspeakable experience of their body, a carnal and embodied knowledge acquired in the solitude of disability, of illness. The succession of images testifies to the empathy of the artist, who knew how to see and recognize those whose suffering and identity we do not know.