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Dr Beatriz Pichel

Job: Associate Professor in Photographic History

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Humanities

Research group(s): Photographic History Research Centre

Address: 51黑料社区, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

T: +44 (0)116 2506427

E: beatriz.pichel@dmu.ac.uk

W: /phrc

 

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Personal profile

Beatriz is specialist in photographic history, history of medicine and medical humanities, history of emotions and the cultural history of war. After finishing her degree in Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), she specialised in the history of sciences. Her PhD, awarded in 2012 (UAM), examined how photographic practices in First World War France shaped ideas and experiences of death at war. During her doctoral years, Beatriz developed great interest in photographic history, the history of the body and the history of emotions, and was fascinated by medical photography. In 2014, she joined the PHRC as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow. Her postdoctoral project focused on photography and emotions in psychology and theatre at the turn of the nineteenth century in France. She has published on this topic in History of the Human Sciences (2015), Fotogeschichte (2016) and Media History (2018), and the collective volume on Emotional Bodies. The Historical Performativity of Emotions, co-edited with Dr Dolores Martin-Moruno and published with University of Illinois Press in 2019. Her first monograph, Picturing the Western Front. Photography, Practices and Experiences in First World War France (Manchester University Press, 2021) examines how photographic practices articulated war experiences. Beatriz is working on a new project, Photography and the Making of the Medical Sciences in France, 1860-1914, which has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant, and will be published as a monograph with Palgrave.

Beatriz supervises doctoral students working on photographic history, women's history, archives and collections, war history and more. She welcomes applications from prospective PhD students interested in the areas of photographic history, medical history, gender history and the history of emotions.

Research group affiliations

Publications and outputs


  • dc.title: The Institutionalisation of Medical Photography, Public Funding and the Medical Reform in Parisian Hospitals (1878-1913) dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: While historians of photography and medicine have rarely engaged with the financial aspects of medical photography, funding strategies had a key role in the early development of this practice. The subventions provided by the French welfare organisation Assistance Publique and approved by the Paris city council between 1879 and 1913 enabled the institutionalisation of photography in Parisian hospitals. During the first period (ca. 1879鈥�98), the Assistance Publique funded photography as part of the growing hospital museum collections. During the second period (ca. 1898鈥�1913), funding to laboratories and radiography departments resulted in the multiplication and diversification of photography. Reading medical photography through the analysis of financial records demonstrates that the reformers鈥� trust in photography as a technology of modernisation turned individual and scattered uses of photography into an institutional medical activity. This analysis helps identify the extent of medical photography in Parisian hospitals and explains why only some institutions such as La Salp锚tri猫re were able to produce large quantities of photographs. Exploring medical photography from a funding point of view shows the medical, political and financial reasons that facilitated the institutionalisation of photography in Parisian hospitals and provides new methodological opportunities for the study of medical photography away from the visual. dc.description: open access article

  • dc.title: Photographic Sources in the History of Psychiatry dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: This chapter provides tools for using photographic sources in the history of psychiatry. It demonstrates that photographs are very versatile sources that can be integrated into the history of psychiatry in different ways to explore the history of psychiatric categories and medical theories, patients鈥� experiences and more. The first section examines several case studies, from the renowned images made by Hugh Welch Diamond and Jean-Martin Charcot to lesser known materials. It discusses questions such as the supposed objectivity of photographs, the emergence of photographic protocols and the lack thereof, the circulation of photographs and practices among different institutions, the agency of patients, the relationship between photographs, text and other visual media and the impact of colonialism and criminology studies. The second section presents the main historiographical trends, from the influence of Foucauldian studies on power and the medical gaze to recent work on material practices. Lastly, the final section provides tips for searching medical photographs in archives and discusses the ethics of researching and publishing sensitive sources.

  • dc.title: Picturing the Western Front. Photography, Practices and Experiences in First World War France dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: Between 1914 and 1918, military, press and amateur photographers produced thousands of pictures. Either classified in military archives specially created with this purpose in 1915, collected in personal albums or circulated in illustrated magazines, photographs were supposed to tell the story of the war. Picturing the Western Front argues that photographic practices also shaped combatants and civilians' war experiences. Doing photography (taking pictures, posing for them, exhibiting, cataloguing and looking at them) allowed combatants and civilians to make sense of what they were living through. Photography mattered because it enabled combatants and civilians to record events, establish or reinforce bonds with one another, represent bodies, place people and events in imaginative geographies and making things visible, while making others, such as suicide, invisible. Photographic practices became, thus, frames of experience.

  • dc.title: Emotional Bodies. The Historical Performativity of Emotions dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz; Martin Moruno, Dolores dc.description.abstract: What do emotions actually do? Recent work in the history of emotions and its intersections with cultural studies and new materialism has produced groundbreaking revelations around this fundamental question. In Emotional Bodies, contributors pick up these threads of inquiry to propose a much-needed theoretical framework for further study of materiality of emotions, with an emphasis on emotions' performative nature. Drawing on diverse sources and wide-ranging theoretical approaches, they illuminate how various persons and groups鈥攑atients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds, and humanitarian agencies鈥攑erform emotional practices. A section devoted to medical history examines individual bodies while a section on social and political histories studies the emergence of collective bodies. Contributors: Jon Arrizabalaga, Rob Boddice, Leticia Fern谩ndez-Fontecha, Emma Hutchison, Dolores Mart铆n-Moruno, Piroska Nagy, Beatriz Pichel, Mar铆a Ros贸n, Pilar Le贸n-Sanz, Bertrand Taithe, and Gian Marco Vidor. "This wide-ranging and rigorously historicized collection of essays gives new insights into how emotions have changed and been deployed over time. The stress on emotions as a practical engagement with the world that has tangible effects is especially welcome."--Jo Labanyi, editor of Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice

  • dc.title: Photographing the Emotional Body. Performing Expressions in the Theatre and the Psychological Sciences dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: This chapter examines the medical, chronophotographic and theatrical photographs taken in the 1890s by Albert Londe, Head of the Photographic Service at the Parisian hospital La Salp锚tri猫re. Situating Londe鈥檚 production in the broader context of psychological and physiological theories of emotions emerging at the time, this chapter argues that photography became a key tool in the understanding of embodied expressions of emotions. Photographs served scientific and laypeople to grasp the gestures鈥� meaning, that is, the emotions that they were supposed to communicate, as well as their materiality, the nervous and muscular processes than produced them. This analysis demonstrates that photographic practices became performative practices which articulated emotional bodies

  • dc.title: Reading Photography in French Nineteenth-Century Journals dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: This article explores how photographs published in the French medical and, to some extent, the popular press helped readers to interpret expressions and gestures as signs of emotional states, morbid conditions and physiological and psychological processes. The 铿乺st two sections examine the use of photography to visualise normal and pathological bodies through measurements and experiments in the medical press, particularly Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salp锚tri猫re, Archives de Neurologie and L鈥橝nn茅e Psychologique. The next two sections study how the development of new photographic processes such as the magnesium 铿俛sh and chronophotography created new conditions in which the body could be visually scrutinised in the medical press as well as popular journals such as Le Th茅芒tre and the general scienti铿乧 journal La Nature. This analysis results in two main 铿乶dings: 1) medical journals used photography to assert their own disciplinary identities, and 2) photography acted as a potential bridge between audiences, as some medical and popular journals shared the same beliefs regarding photography鈥檚 ability to represent the human body, but approached photographic innovations from different, albeit complementary, ways. dc.description: Open access article

  • dc.title: Cuerpos patol贸gicos. Fotograf铆a y medicina en el siglo XIX dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: This article examines different approaches to nineteenth-century medical photography. It argues that we should go beyond the visual analysis to examine the material conditions in which photographs were taken and reproduced. It does so taking as a case study two illustrated journals: Iconographie photographique de la Salp锚tri猫re (1875-1880) y Nouvelle iconographie de la Salp锚tri猫re (1888-1918). An exhaustive analysis demonstrates that the different photographic practices materialised in each publication constructed visually and medically the hysterical body in a different way.

  • dc.title: Illness and image. Case studies in the medical humanities by Sander L. Gilman dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz

  • dc.title: Les Gueules Cass茅es. Photography and the Making of Disfigurement dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz dc.description.abstract: Between 1914 and 1918, French visual culture was saturated with photographs of amputees: ex-combatants who had lost an arm or a leg, and had substituted them for prosthetic devices. However, these pictures were all about body mutilations. Facial injuries were also profusely photographed, but barely penetrated into the French visual culture. This article explores the reasons behind this invisibility. It maintains that, during the war, bodily mutilations were associated with discourses on re-education, while facial wounds were connected to the rhetoric of reconstruction. This distinction, grounded on concerns about the function of the limbs and the appearance of the face, was the source of the sparse dissemination of photographs of facial injuries. It will be argued that these wounds became visible only when the focus shifted from the appearance to the social function of the face, and facial injuries began to be understood as 鈥榙isfigurement鈥�. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: Die psychologie des l盲chelns bei Georges Dumas. Eine fotogeschiliche studie dc.contributor.author: Pichel, Beatriz

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Key research outputs

  • 2021: Beatriz Pichel, Picturing the Western Front. Photography, Practices and Experiences in First World War France (Manchester: Manchester University Press)

  • 2019: Dolores Martin-Moruno and Beatriz Pichel (eds), Emotional Bodies. Studies on the Performativity of Emotions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press)

  • 2018: Reading Photography in French Nineteenth-Century Periodicals”, Media History, Special Issue “Working with Nineteenth-Century Medical and Health Periodicals” (online first), OA

  • 2016: “Les Gueules Cassées: Photography and the Making of Disfigurement”, Journal of War and Culture Studies Special Issue “Assessing the Legacy of the Gueules Cassées: From surgery to art”. Published online first.

  • 2016: “The Psychology of the Smile in Georges Dumas: A Photographic Study”, in Fotogeschichte. Summer, 140: 36, 13-24.
  • 2015: “From Facial Expressions to Bodily Gestures: Photography, Passions and Movement in Nineteenth-Century Sciences in France”, History of the Human Sciences, online first 27 December, vol 29 (1), 2016, pp. 27-48. OA.

Research interests/expertise

-        Photographic History / History of Photography

-        Medical Humanities

-        History of Medicine

-        Cultural History

-        History of Emotions

-        History of the Body

-        Gender and Women’s History

-        History of War

-        Visual Science and Technology Studies

Areas of teaching

  •  Photography History
  •  History
  • History of Science and Medicine
  • Gender History

Qualifications

  • PhD in History and Philosophy of Sciences, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain (2012)
  • M.A. in Sciences and Culture Studies, UAM, Spain (2008)
  • B.A. in Philosophy, UAM, Spain (2006)
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