Exposition

What Counts : On the implications of photography with the commodification of the body in the German healthcare system (2025)

Patricia Kühfuss
Ega Huurdeman
open exposition

About this exposition

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society Using photography as a point of reference, this master thesis explores the political, cultural and scientific structures which allow profit-making with human sickness in the German healthcare system. It is argued how photography — in the form of medical imaging — separates physically representable symptoms from patients and their lived experience, by that creating an abridged representation of life. As healthcare has been deliberately embedded in a profit-oriented market by politicians over the last decades, medical imaging today not only acts as an operational image that gives evidence helping to diagnose a patient, but also as an operational image which facilitates the commodification of the body. This puts the well-being of both patients and medical staff (and therefore society at large) at stake. In the context of this analysis the question arises how photography itself can act as a tool to bring these issues to discussion. Because visual makers themselves deal with the challenge of being part of a profit-oriented system, this demands reexamination of the stories considered worth telling.
typeresearch exposition
keywordshealthcare, capitalism, Body, medical imaging, Master Photography & Society
date12/10/2022
published21/05/2025
last modified21/05/2025
statuspublished
share statusprivate
affiliationRoyal Academy of Art, The Hague
copyrightPatricia Kühfuss
licenseAll rights reserved
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1759925/1759924
published inRoyal Academy of Art, The Hague
portal issue0. Publications 2022
external linkwww.patriciakuehfuss.com


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