Niermann: “You also photographed the administration of electroshocks.”

“I thought to myself, ‘You have to photograph this’. Because this is something Collomb had actually declared inappropriate for the hospital in Fann. But there was still an old pavilion where this was being done. It was so awful. The plug was simply stuck in the wall socket, then something broke in the brain.”

In this instance, Leonore Mau, who sensitively captured the dimension of discomfort for the portrayed people at the moment they are being photographed (conversation Ottinger), and who set herself the rule of ‘never [becoming] the unsolicited photographer who collects people’ or never photographing individuals without their consent (Niermann interview), was documenting people in a highly vulnerable situation. As such, her intention to document the events stands in a problematic – if not antagonistic – relationship to the idea of safeguarding the dignity and individual rights of the people being photographed.

Whereas the manner in which the photos came about in the psychiatric villages calls for the pictorial material to be handled with particular sensitivity, when it comes to the images Mau shot for Grosse Anatomie in the Nina Rodriguez Institute of Forensic Medicine in Bahia, depicting the autopsies of various corpses, our attention instead must be focused more on the question regarding the respective context where the images were later to be reproduced. As such, the original situation of the pictures’ making does not seem to be especially marked by the aforementioned ambivalence. To go by Fichte’s accounts (i.e. Sprit, Monatsmagazin für Kultur und Politik, no. 1, 1973), the presence of spectators at autopsies of this kind was not uncommon. Rather, it was the later reproduction in magazines and catalogues, and the exhibition in galleries of these extremely explicit images that pose uncomfortable questions about the attitude of viewers and publicists alike. Leonore Mau added a restriction note to the limited-edition photo portfolio, thereby prohibiting the reproduction of the photographs. Whether this restriction note was prompted by the subject of the images or by sales-related concerns could not as yet be clarified. But the fact that in her own lifetime, Leonore Mau allowed images of the corpses and their autopsies to be exhibited (i.e. Als Gast von Hinrich Sachs: Leonore Mau, Fotografin at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2002) or reproduced (i.e. in: Wilfried F. Schoeller, Hubert Fichte und Leonore Mau. Der Schriftsteller und die Fotografin, 2005) shows that we should not restrict ourselves simply to analysing the origination contexts and photographic approach from ethical standpoints, but also examine the history of the images’ reproduction and reception, which – as shown in the case of the Grosse Anatomie – can in part have a dynamic unaffected by the intentions of their authors.

What was the situation at the moment of photographing? Which visual axes and hierarchies were established or reproduced? Who has a name or a story, who is made an object? Who is an individual, who is the portrayed subject and who is simply ethnographic “material”? How do we view and stage “the Other”? Which audience is being addressed by the photography and what is the precise process of reproduction and reception of any image? These are just a few of the questions that can offer orientation when establishing criteria for an ethically responsible approach to documentary photography. Knowing full well that it is wholly impossible to derive concrete, let alone universally valid strategies and directives or principles for action from these criteria, publicising institutions should nonetheless consider these questions when evolving a policy that facilitates making decisions on which images might be published in which context.

In the case of the images of patients in psychiatric treatment, we have decided not to publish them online, but nevertheless make them available for research and accessible to scholars. For this is precisely what this website seeks to achieve: to send an impulse for research into these issues and to persistently question and renew the criteria for an ethically responsible approach above all towards documentary photography.