Visual Plague

How epidemic photography during a global pandemic of bubonic plague contributed to the development of modern epidemiology and our concept of the 'pandemic.' 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 reconceptualizing 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. As the third plague pandemic struck more and more countries, the international circulation of plague photographs in the press generated an unprecedented spectacle of imminent global