Techniques of vision: photography practices and the governing of subjectivities

• Main Author: Lewis, Goldwyn
• Other Authors: Heir, Sean P.
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: photography in psychotherapy; Michel Foucault; UVic Subject Index::Humanities and Social Sciences::Sociology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/1990

This thesis explores how photography has been used in the governing of subjectivities and draws on the following three forms of governmentality identified by Michel Foucault: biopower, discipline and ethics. In photography's early history discourses on character and insanity privileged visual observation and the camera was used as a more precise extension of the clinician's eye. With the emergence of Freud's "talking cure" the use of still-photography in treatment and diagnosis was generally neglected until the 1970s when the medium was re-configured as an ideal technique for accessing the unconscious. Currently Phototherapy clients, with the aid of a therapist, use personal photos in order to identify and modify problematic aspects of self. I draw on Michel Foucault's second and third period work in order to investigate these shifting relationships of photography to subjectivity.