iankirk.net

A small body of works of cultural theory that addresses medical Images such as X-rays, MRI, PET, Computed Tomography and their variants has emerged in the last couple of decades¹. The rhetoric of these works has tended to assimilate these forms of images directly into a broader discussion of visual culture, often drawing analogies – consciously or apparently unconsciously – with photography and cinema. Of course these images called images after all, so it does not at first seem too problematic to attempt to order them within visual culture.

The photographic camera is in many ways the ideal apparatus of Modernism. In considering the genealogy of photography, Geoffrey Batchen wonders why a discourse articulating the desire and possibility of ‘fixing the images they saw in their the camera obscuras’¹ only emerged after the 1790s.