cover image Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric

Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric

Robert Bogdan, with Martin Elks and James Knoll. Syracuse Univ., $55 (198p) ISBN 978-0-8156-3302-0

Syracuse University social scientist Bogdon (Freak Show) examines historical pictures of people with disabilities, situating his subjects within a cultural history and examining the "visual rhetoric" employed to capture them. He describes his approach and research techniques, encouraging the reader to engage the images with specific textual interjections%E2%80%94an approach complicated by the pictures not always appearing on the same page as Bogdon's assessment. The chapters are organized by category of disability: freak portraits, asylums, clinical photographs, and others. This structure allows Bogdon to address larger issues at play during multiple eras of his study. In the category of freak photography, for example, subjects were portrayed as important and financially well-to-do%E2%80%94a source of entertainment rather than pity. Strangely, considering his structural choices, Bogdon is unwilling to closely examine social and political forces behind these images%E2%80%94a fact that he readily admits in the conclusion. 223 b&w illus. (Dec.)