ABSTRACT
The camera has been employed as an instrument of empirical judgment, surveillance, social documentation, and artistic creation. Photographic portraiture in particular crosses these diverse contexts, as photographic conventions for displaying the body serve as visual codes for measuring, stereotyping, and memorializing human beings. Photography, through repeated visual conventions, has established cultural codes for notions of “normal” versus “pathological” human appearance, behavior, and character. Yet, the camera has also been an instrument of memory and nostalgia, as well as a medium for the representation of a loved one, or muse. This chapter contemplates and compares all these contexts while gazing at photographs of bodies, specifically Susan Harbage Page’s photographs of her developmentally disabled nephew, Peter. The photographs produce multidimensional and humanistic representations of him, which I will demonstrate by comparing and contrasting them with other visual representations of children and of developmentally disabled subjects. Page’s photographs of Peter incorporate elements from the other images I analyze; yet, they strongly distinguish themselves from these counter-examples by being intimate and yet defiant of cultural stereotypes of developmentally disabled subjects. I will also conceive of Page’s and Peter’s relationship as one of artist and muse, to emphasize the intersubjectivity of their collaborative artwork and to undermine the conventional power dynamics between a non-disabled photographer and a disabled, objectified subject.
