In theorizing in dark times, how do images help us see—or obscure—what counts as a body, a subject, or a life? This presentation draws from research supported by the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History at Yale University, examining 19th-century photographic techniques (daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes) and their entanglement with the evolution of medical epistemology. These early technologies, which materialized the human body through an emerging clinical gaze, offer an entry point into the political stakes of visual theory.

Framing medical imaging as both scientific record and aesthetic performance, the author argues that early medical photography did not merely document illness—it helped define the visual codes by which the body became knowable, governable, and eventually, computable. By tracing the ontological transformation of images—from singular material objects to data-driven, algorithmic entities—this paper explores how visual representation is always already a form of political theory.

Bringing this historical archive into dialogue with contemporary questions around algorithmic vision and surveillance medicine, I ask: What does it mean to theorize images in dark times, when seeing itself is shaped by infrastructures of control? How do arts of seeing—and unseeing—form part of our resistance or complicity? This talk invites reflection on the role of visual theory as both critique and creation, mapping how image-making practices negotiate power, narrative, and embodied knowledge.