This section features student projects from an undergraduate class titled “Queer Photography from France in the 19th Century.” Visualizing the intersection of medical, colonial, and photographic practices alongside critical analysis illuminates the multifaceted process of visually constructing identities that originated in the 19th century. It presents photo-texts that explore how photography has been entangled with ideas about the body, normality, pathology, race, and gender. Rather than treating images as neutral documents, these projects ask how scientific, medical, and political theories have shaped the way people were photographed, staged, captioned, and classified — and how those visual regimes still echo today.
A photo-text is a combination of photographic images and written text presented together to create a cohesive narrative or artistic expression. This format is often used in books, exhibitions, and multimedia projects to enhance the storytelling potential of both mediums, providing deeper context, commentary, or emotional impact.
Each project takes a specific intersection between photography and the history of ideas as its starting point:
• “La photographie, la physionomie, et le racisme”
This project traces how the pseudoscience of physiognomy used photography to link facial features, criminality, and race. Beginning with Cesare Lombroso’s criminological portraits and asylum photographs, it shows how faces were read as evidence of moral character and “degeneration.” It then turns to contemporary facial-recognition systems and the wrongful arrest of Nijeer Parks to argue that physiognomic thinking has not disappeared but has shifted into algorithmic forms of racial profiling. Historical images are read alongside Ken Gonzales-Day’s Profiled series to highlight how museum busts and digital scans both participate in the long history of racist face analysis.
• “Trouver le juste milieu entre l’esthétique et la médecine”
Focusing on Duchenne de Boulogne, this project examines how early medical photography tried to strike a “balance” between art and science. Through close readings of Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine and the Album de photographies pathologiques, it shows how Duchenne used light, pose, and classical visual codes to construct “types” of emotion (fear, charm) and “types” of illness or deformity. Faces and bodies are framed as exemplary cases: the “typical” expression of fear, the “typical” crooked back, the “typical” sick boy. At the same time, Duchenne’s aesthetic choices and his staging of female models in eroticised or voyeuristic poses reveal misogynist and ableist stereotypes, undercutting his claim that the camera is a neutral “mirror of truth.”
• “La photographie avec l’hypnose : comprendre l’hystérie”
This project explores how Charcot combined hypnosis and photography at the Salpêtrière to define and display hysteria. Using images from the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière and engravings of the Tuesday lectures, it analyses sequences of léthargie, catalepsie and hystéro-épilepsie, where women are photographed in rigid, contorted poses under the gaze of male doctors. Photography here functions as both clinical “proof” and spectacle: a way for Charcot to translate his theories into visible, repeatable tableaux. The project highlights how these images stage women’s bodies to fit pre-defined phases of hysteria, remove agency from the patients, and consolidate Charcot’s authority as discoverer and classifier of the disease.
• “Comment la photographie a-t-elle impacté la dimension d’archive et pédagogique des études de Charcot sur l’hystérie à la Salpêtrière ?”
Here, the focus is on photography as an archival and teaching tool. The project shows how images of patients like Augustine were used in lectures and publications to build a visual archive of hysteria that could be circulated far beyond the hospital. At the same time, it stresses the ethical and epistemic costs of this archive: women in psychiatric care were photographed without consent, their faces made public, and their gestures reinterpreted to fit Charcot’s narrative. The student argues that photographs validated Charcot’s ideas for his contemporaries while often recording performances shaped by power, reward, and threat rather than “spontaneous” symptoms.
• “Comment la photographie a-t-elle contribué au développement de l’eugénisme ?”
This project examines how photography helped give eugenics a persuasive visual language. Starting from Francis Galton’s composite portraits of “criminal types” and “Jewish type,” it explains how multiple faces were superimposed to produce blurred “averages” that seemed to reveal the essence of a group. These images, framed as scientific, suggested a causal link between appearance and character, legitimising the idea that some people were naturally criminal or inferior. The project then follows this visual logic to the international eugenics congresses and to Nazi programmes such as the Lebensborn birth houses, showing how photographs of “Aryan” babies, nurses, and institutional environments naturalised racial selection and the project of “improving” the human race.
• “Les motifs visuels hystériques charcotiens”
This project looks at Charcot’s work from the perspective of visual motifs and their afterlives. Drawing on Albert Londe’s chronophotographs and Brouillet’s famous painting of the Tuesday lessons, it analyses how poses such as the arc de cercle (the dramatic backward arch of the body) were established as canonical images of hysteria. Using Didi-Huberman, Timpano, Gilman and others, it traces this motif backwards to earlier art (for example, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Esther before Ahasuerus) and forwards into fin-de-siècle cabaret, Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters, modern dance (Mary Wigman) and even butoh. The student shows how what Charcot presented as objective medical imagery also functioned as a kind of bodily theatre that shaped modern representations of female madness, desire, and power.
Please note that these projects are written in French. A English translation follows.