HOLDING THE NEGATIVE (in development)
Holding the Negative responds to 19th-century practices of photographing people compelled to live in psychiatric institutions, without consideration of consent. These images, now held in archives such as the Bethlem Archive Collection, reflect histories of medicalisation, surveillance and exclusion. How might portraiture be reworked so that those with lived experience reclaim authorship of their image and narrative? What happens when historic techniques are reworked critically rather than simply reproduced? Can co-creation shift the power dynamics embedded in these forms?
The project builds on research into Victorian asylum records, casebooks and early photographic materials I began through Change Minds at Bethlem Museum of the Mind and Bethlem Hospital Archives. I was particularly struck by mid-19th-century photographs of people compelled to live at Bethlem, taken at admission and held alongside written notes in large leather-bound ledgers. In some photographs, nurses' hands enter the frame, reaching toward the patient-subject. For me, these hands make visible institutional power: the moment when a person’s body, image, and story are anonymised and instrumentalised, absorbed by systems of classification. Photography did not simply record people in these contexts; it helped produce them as diagnoses, examples and visual proof.
In 2024, I was commissioned by the British Art Network and Outside In, as part of New Dialogues, to research art made in historic mental health settings, including the Adamson Collection at Wellcome Collection Library. This expanded my thinking around agency and desire. Much of the Adamson Collection predates the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and it raised questions about who was institutionalised for queerness, sexual nonconformity, gendered disobedience, classed behaviour or other forms of social refusal. I became interested in where private, intimate or self-directed desire might survive under a pathologising gaze.