Abstract
A 1962 photomicrograph of a mosquito taken in what was then a Tanganyikan mountain laboratory offers a prompt to consider the social salience and affective power of scientific images. Drawing inspiration from anthropological work on photographic practices, this article excavates the diverse geopolitical and domestic contexts of the image's production, consumption and circulation, so as to grasp the relationship between scientific labors and lives. As much souvenir as “epistemic thing,” the photomicrograph provides new directions in thinking about the materiality of memory in tropical medicine.
Highlights
Visual AnthropologyISSN: 0894-9468 (Print) 1545-5920 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvan
A 1962 photomicrograph of a mosquito taken in what was a Tanganyikan mountain laboratory offers a prompt to consider the social salience and affective power of scientific images
The photomicrographic trace becomes an archive as a drawing could not; the photograph is a resource for further inquiry
Summary
ISSN: 0894-9468 (Print) 1545-5920 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gvan. ‘‘Unstitched’’ from the entomological project, the photomicrograph can, as Daston and Galison suggest, provide ‘‘a resource for further inquiry’’— though not in this case towards illuminating the natural processes cultured on the slide, but in excavating the intersections of scientific sites, materials and lives, memories and aspirations This article develops those connections across three sections, each drawing upon a distinct repertoire of visual materials. While Gillies would go to great lengths to confirm the accuracy of Wilkes’ assessments (including running blind tests using laboratory-reared mosquitoes) the eight-‘‘bump’’ photomicrograph testifies to Wilkes’ ability, both to recognize the subtle changes in the mosquito and to render those vital signs visible to others Gillies, for his part, never managed to come to grips with the method—a shortcoming that he made sense of in terms of a lack of visual imagination: the main difference seemed to lie in our respective abilities to build up a composite picture of the conditions of the ovaries from fleeting glimpses of a series of ovariolar stalks, each of which might only be fully extended for a matter of seconds . The valleys and in the clouds, the lone entomologist at the microscope is just one in a series of insect-visions
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