Portrait and Scan

• In Event: The Matter of Photography: Decay, Conservation, Afterlives

Abstract

This paper is sparked by anger about an image. Specifically, it responds to the anger of Srey Neang, a young woman in Phnom Penh, whose prenatal ultrasound image deteriorated such that it was not worth saving in an album for her son. Her frustration with the fading color—was it from the heat, the moisture, the ink, the paper?—would perhaps be shared by anyone, but for Srey Neang its intensity was heightened by the fact that it was the only image she had. She was unable to afford another. Listening to her anger, we hear a story about prenatal ultrasound images that winds away from the poles of “science” and “entertainment”, “care” and “consumption”. Srey Neang wanted to learn about the health of the pregnancy from the doctor looking at his monitor; she wanted a portrait of her son-to-be from the image she took home from the clinic. Couched within the broader argument that ultrasound participates in different doings—pregnancy, kin—this paper explores affects and economies of relating to the materiality of images produced from sound: portrait and scan. In doing so, it contributes to STS in its method of listening, and its attention to the elemental instability of images.

Author

• Jenna Grant, University of Washington