Photographic records 2 in psychiatric nursing homes: what facial expressions reveal

Abstract

In the middle of 19th century, photography emerged as an important tool for diagnosing patients with psychiatric problems, a technique employed by one of the most important specialists of the time, the British Hugh Welch Diamond. The psychiatrist of Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, England, believed that the treatment of mental disorders would achieve full success from the use of physiognomy, art based on the evaluation of the character or personality of a person from facial expressions. In the second part of this article, connections between Diamond’s
experiments and his achievement behind the lenses of other photographers allow us to develop theoreticaliconographic analyzes about the patients’ look at the Juqueri Psychiatric Hospital in different periods, which gives us clues about certain individuals who were deeply observing as much as they were amply “taken by the eye” of the camera. Just as the machine waged a dialogue fraught with symbologies and impressions, in parallel in the field of visual arts, its major representative, Van Gogh, thus recorded this ambivalence in producing series of self-portraits, especially in the period in which he was in an institution for the mentally ill, considered one of the most creative of the artist’s career.