Lonely Together: Subaltern Family Albums and Kinship During Medical Incarceration

Abstract

During one of the longest and most extensive systems of medical incarceration in modern history (1866–1969), the Hawai‘i Board of Health exiled men, women, and children with leprosy (now known as Hansen’s disease) to a remote settlement on the island of Molokai. Some of these patients had access to cameras and the time to pursue photography, unlike most institutionalized and incarcerated people in the twentieth century. This article discusses subaltern family photographs produced by male patients during their decades-long exile from the 1930s to the 1990s. Patient-photographers crafted vernacular albums that reimagined non-normative, a-filial kinship in the absence of family connectedness and biological reproduction. Facing death and displacement, photographers envisioned uncertain futures suffused with anticipation, loss, and loneliness. While family albums are archival practices usually associated with women, unpartnered men took up the labor of piecing together affective relationships with chosen intimates. I further consider how patients developed anti-spectacular visual practices to represent heterogeneous bodies with disabilities, including their own, in consumer snapshots.