Plague and the Emergence of Epidemic Photography
The talk by Christos Lynteris examined the way in which a new photographic genre emerged in the context of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1959): epidemic photography. Differing from medical photography in that it did not focus on symptoms or the pathology of the disease, epidemic photography took as its subject the real or imagined causes of plague outbreaks across the globe. The talk argued that epidemic photography played a key role in establishing the notion and experience of the ‘pandemic’ in the modern world.
About the Medical Anthropologist
Christos Lynteris is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His work examines epistemological and biopolitical aspects of epidemics with a particular focus on zoonotic diseases. His recent publications include the books Ethnographic Plague (Palgrave 2016), Human Extinction and the Pandemic Imaginary (Routlege 2019), and, co-authored with Lukas Engelmann, Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Sanitation (MIT Press, 2020). He was the PI of the ERC-funded project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic and is currently the PI of the Wellcome Investigator Award The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis.
