A Shared Humanity: Photography and Institutionalization in the 20th Century
Aurora Berger
As Published in The Children of Edgewood by Ryan Herz, Drkrm Editions: Los Angeles, CA, 2020.
Disabled bodies hold the trauma of the generations that came before our own. Through epigenetics we hold the stories of Carrie Buck, Henrietta Lacks, Terri Schiavo, the inmates at Willowbrook State School, and many others within us, knowing that their fights are our fights, and that their fights are not yet over. Institutionalization destroyed the bodyminds of thousands of disabled children and adults in the late 1800s-1900s. Their stories are our stories.
Ryan Herz’s photographs of the Edgewood Center depict a bright, cheerful environment. The residents appear healthy and well cared for. They are the model of what we like to believe institutions look like. However, we must ensure that in our admiration for a job well done, a difficult situation not exploited, we do not gloss over the lived experiences of those disabled individuals in similar predicaments who fared much more poorly at the hands of those in power.
Tracing the history of a marginalized people is never easy. In the search for information that came before digital archives, we must rely on medical records, first-hand accounts, court cases, and yes the accounts of those on the outside. For a group whose entire history is tied up in their dehumanization and removal from society, these outside accounts are often all we have but we must still remember that they are indeed taken from the bystanders, not the subjects of these events.
It is important therefore that we recognize the power dynamics between the photographer and the photographed. What do each party in these relationships have to gain from their interactions? We must explore how and why historical photographs of institutions were taken, and who benefited from them.
In 1932 Margaret Bourke-White was contracted by the governors of Letchworth Village, the institution that would later become famous alongside the neighboring with Willowbrook State School. Bourke-White's photographs were propaganda, showing Letchworth to be an excellent facility wherein the mentally and physically disabled were put to work in the fields, capitalizing on disabled bodyminds for labor, rather than viewing them as a drain on resources as is often thought today.
We must remember, as we look at these historical photographs that any photographs taken with the intention of minimizing the lived experiences of the patients/inmates is propaganda supporting the institutions. Bourke-White's photographs therefore cannot be considered unbiased evidence of the conditions at Letchworth village, but this fact is inconsequential to the impact that the images had when they were eventually published. The images, which were largely posed, showed Letchworth as clean, organized and full of labor, and that is how Letchworth was therefore perceived by those on the outside.
Although the institution was later photographed by two other photographers, Arnold Genthe in 1941 and Irving Haberman in the late 1940s, Bourke-White's photographs are still the best publicized and most often circulated. Genthe’s photographs showed a far less sterile and organized institution where the inmates appeared to be doing hard work but were well-clothed and seemingly cared. Haberman’s photographs, by contrast, showed inmates as dirty and naked living in conditions that Albert Deutsch called “euthanasia through neglect”.
This exploration of the photographic history of Letchworth Village is noteworthy in that it is possibly the only major institution to have been repeatedly photographed and I believe that the vast disparity in the images taken is an excellent example of the ways that disabled bodies have been exploited and their trauma used as career building blocks for the more privileged bodies surrounding them. Did the conditions within the institution really change so dramatically between 1932 and 1945, or are the differences in the photographs due to the photographer’s intentions?
This work is never easy to comb through. As a disabled person, looking at these photographs is often heartbreaking. In a history so filled with exploitation, Herz’s work often feels like a breath of fresh air. His photograph of two patients embracing is perhaps my favorite in the Edgewood collection. Disabled bodies are often portrayed as immature, incompetent, and incapable of meaningful human relationships. In contrast, this photograph shows a deep sustained bond between two patients. As the standing patient leans in to hug the seated one, she lets go of her cane, showing her trust of the other body to hold her up. This type of relationship or friendship is rarely seen in documentation of institutionalization, perhaps because it goes against the narrative of the disabled bodymind as “other”. This photograph humanizes the subjects and we as viewers understand the impact. This is not to say that an image taken with good intentions cannot still exploit, but many of these images of children smiling and laughing gives them the space to be not just the sorrowful image of disability, but joyful, thriving, and full of life.
Looking back to the work of other photographers from the 19th century who photographed within institutions, we find Peter Hujar, Richard Avedon, and of course Diane Arbus, who all did stints photographing inside institutions. Each came to the work with their own intentions, and with different forms of support from the institutions that they documented. Peter Hujar, who photographed residents at the Southbury Training School in Southbury Connecticut and Florence, Italy, was invited to Southbury by a friend who worked there at the time. Hujars photographs from 1956-1958 are tender and full of compassion, as was his way. Hujar went on to photograph the AIDS crisis, so his work in the institutions makes some degree of sense within his oeuvre, unlike many photographers (like Bourke-White and Avedon) for whom the institutional work seems more of a one-time interest project.
Richard Avedon spent a week in 1963 at the East Louisiana State Hospital, access to which he was granted by the institution’s superintendent, who even offered to let Avedon stay in his own home. Perhaps it was Avedon’s fame that enabled him to print the images he did, or perhaps the superintendent truly did not see the way that the images Avedon has taken placed his institution in a negative light. After all, for many of the people who ran these facilities, the conditions seemed unproblematic. Avedon came to East Lousiana State with the intention of “giving a face to the faceless”, in homage to his sister Louise who had been institutionalized for the last decade of her life. Avedon spent much of the week sleeping on the ward, a full immersion that was surprising, but possibly his way of trying to understand what his sister was going through. Avedon’s photographs of the inmates at East Lousiana State are haunting. As Jacob Pagano writes in Medium, “he…finds subjects who at once testify to the horrors of life in the hospital, and also to those who connect with him and seem, through face-to-face communication, to tell us of a shared humanness.”
While Avedon’s photographs are haunting in their humanity, Diane Arbus’s are haunting in their grotesque lack of compassion. Although many critics have noted the photographs from her Untitled Series as the most sympathetic of her work, the images still enfreak her subjects through her choices to portray them as spectacle. In my mind the biggest difference between Arbus and the other artists discussed here is that Arbus was not at these institutions in the role of documentary photographer, and her work never claimed to fall within the artifices of reality. Arbus’s Untitled are instead an exploration of the grotesque, returning to the fading glory of the freak show and dehumanizing her subjects as she did so. The subjects of the Untitled series are masked, contorted, and otherwise othered by Arbus’s camera.
The success of institutionalization in the public eye relied on the dehumanization of a disabled bodymind, the labeling of these bodyminds as feebleminded, moronic, idiotic, spastic. These were not just free flowing insults, they were legal terms cast upon disabled bodies as methods of devaluation.
A photograph can always be read though many different lenses: the lens of history, the lens of the present, the lens of intent. It is important that we consider each of these perspectives within any contemporary analysis. The Edgewood photographs, taken in 1976 can be read in the context of their time. They were taken at end of institutionalization, the year after the O'Connor v. Donaldson Supreme Court case and the 1975 dramatization of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, four years after Geraldo Rivera’s Willowbrook exposé. It is important to note that the first wave of deinstitutionalization in the 1950’s was largely due to the introduction of psychiatric drugs. The second wave, in the 1970’s, coincided with the creation of Social Security Disability (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), as well as John F Kennedy’s 1963 Community Mental Health Act, which was crucial in the process of deinstitutionalization, as it provided federal funding for community mental health centers and research facilities.
We can also choose to look at these photographs as we see disability today, after the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1991, after the Health Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, after the 1999 Olmstead vs. L.C. Supreme Court Case. Over the past decades we have changed our understanding of what it means to be disabled and what rights people with disabilities deserve to have.
What we need in the future of disability photography is compassion and respect. So much has been taken from bodyminds of disabled peoples against our will. There are no clear guidelines for the use of identifiable documentary photographs, and this further complicates the questions of public and private spaces and the rights to the bodily autonomy that has so often been taken from us. Herz’s photographs balance carefully between access requested and consensual access granted. There was no medical privacy act prior to 1996, whereas all of the other work discussed in this piece was shown shortly after it was taken (with the clear exception of Arbus who died before it could be shown) Herz kept his work private for over 30 years. In doing so, the work becomes a document of a time gone by rather than an instrument of objectification and voyeurism.
Herz’s photographs show a deep respect for his subjects. These are not photographs taken to emphasize difference, but to emphasize humanity.