Description
Pathogens are invisible for the human eye - disease only becomes visible through the marks it leaves on the human body. The emotions evoked by images in the context of health are highly complex and may include compassion and pity as well as disgust and fear. The proposed paper seeks to make sense of this complexity and their impact on the health-security nexus. To do so, it uses the West African Ebola epidemic 2014/2015 as a case study. It identifies two visual themes: the protected body (i.e. health workers in protective clothing) and the body in pain (i.e. images of persons showing signs of infection) and discusses the complex emotions tied to them: on the one hand, due to the evocation of colonial stereotypes, the images create distance between the photographed person and the viewer, on the other hand, the fear of contagion makes the distant other seem pretty close. In analyzing this ambiguity, the paper explores the interplay of emotions and images in the context of health crises. It makes the case for taking the role of emotions seriously, both in the field of visual IR and in studies on the health-security nexus.
