Visual Culture, Photography and Medicine

This summer term, stemming out of a close cooperation between University of Vienna and FOTO ARSENAL WIEN, this lecture series equips MA students with a theoretically grounded, media-literate understanding of how medicine operates as a cultural system of images, spaces, and narratives – and how these shape lived realities in powerful, often invisible ways.

Medicine has never been a purely scientific enterprise. It is deeply embedded in cultural imaginaries, visual regimes, and aesthetic practices: from anatomical atlases, hospital architecture, and early medical photography to contemporary imaging technologies, and artistic engagements with illness and care. This lecture series asks how visual culture does not merely represent medicine, but actively produces medical knowledge, norms of the body, and ideas of health, normality, risk, and deviance.

When? Wednesdays, 18:30-20:00 pm
Where? University of Vienna (Hs.C1, Campus AAKH) / Foto Arsenal Wien (varying timeslots) / Online

Organisers: Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Vienna) and Felix Hoffmann (Foto Arsenal Wien)