Published by MIT Press, October 2022
Author: Christos Lynteris, Professor of Medical Anthropology,University of St Andrews, and Visiting Professor at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale at the College de France. Principal Investigator of the project ‘Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic‘ at CRASSH (2013-2017).
In Visual Plague, Christos Lynteris examines the emergence of epidemic photography during the third plague pandemic (1894–1959), a global pandemic of bubonic plague that led to over twelve million deaths. Unlike medical photography, epidemic photography was not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with exposing the patient’s body or medical examinations and operations. Instead, it played a key role in reconceptualising infectious diseases by visualizing the ‘pandemic’ as a new concept and structure of experience—one that frames and responds to the smallest local outbreak of an infectious disease as an event of global importance and consequence.
