Hugh Welch Diamond
1855
Mental patient
Royal Photographic Society
Courtesy Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England
 
Photography seemed to be a mechanism that could produce faithful records whose authenticity could be certified by the institutions of power and control from which they arose. As the British medical journal Lancet proclaimed: "Photography is so essentially the Art of Truth and representative of Truth in Art that it would seem to be the essential means of reproducing all forms and structures of which science seeks for delineation."
 
Lancet, 22 January 1859, 89, quoted in S. L. Gilman, ed., "Hugh W. Diamond and Psychiatric Photography," The Face of Madness (Secaucus, NJ: Brunner-Mazel, 1976), 5.
 
LL/33151