A flash of recognition and divergence: background to the ‘Us and Them’ project

When Historic England launched their ‘everyday heritage’ scheme in early 2023, the Surrey-based community researchers campaigning to provide dignity and recognition to those buried in Horton Cemetery applied for and won a small grant.Footnote ⁸ Alana was the historical consultant on the year-long ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ project and led a series of history-focused, art-therapy workshops with members of the public, orientated around the co-creation of a pop-up ceramic memorial garden of more than 1,500 hand painted flowers. Nearly thirty workshops were held with primary schools, churches, mental health charities (including at the headquarters of Mind), with refugee and asylum seekers, and in dialogue with palliative care support groups. These community history workshops sought to educate diverse audiences about Surrey’s underexplored history as a critical hot-spot for the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness and disability in twentieth-century Britain.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, they sought to raise awareness of the increasing risk of housing development on the Horton Cemetery land in Epsom, and to build a broad-based coalition to push for a compulsory purchase order to return the site to public ownership, with access to graves for relatives.

One such interactive, art-therapy workshop was held in January 2023 with the Freewheelers and while a bubbly young woman named Zena was reading a condensed life history of Sylvester Fury and his difficult life moving between workhouses and asylums,Footnote ¹⁰ she evocatively remarked: ‘One hundred years ago, that could have been us.’Footnote ¹¹ Karl (CEO of Freewheelers) was immediately struck by this insight and the historic patient photographs that undergirded the workshops, as they reminded him of his photographer friend Emma’s portraits and their previous work together on other disability arts projects. It occurred to this emerging project collective that if the Freewheelers were to have their portraits taken using these same historic photographic processes, we could ‘level the playing field, get beneath the superficial surface of things, and begin to explore the real differences between now and then and us and them’.Footnote ¹² The ‘Us and Them’ initiative was born from this intuitive spark of empathetic recognition and compassionate connection across more than a century. It has sought to harness the instinct of these disabled creatives in order that by exploring the points of connection – but also divergences – in the diagnosis and treatment of disability and mental illness across many decades, important conversations about self-expression, dignity, visibility and an ethics of care might be opened out.

Following ethics clearance, and with a small grant of enabling Impact funding from King’s College London,Footnote ¹³ a creative co-participatory team was assembled in partnership with Julian Pooley (archivist, Surrey History Centre) and two preliminary sessions were held at the Freewheelers’ premises, where participants explored how they might wish to represent themselves and their personalities through props, poses and costumes. Two further archival sessions were held at SHC where the Freewheelers explored the history of Surrey’s psychiatric hospitals, including ‘Royal Earlswood Asylum for Idiots and Mental Defectives’ in Redhill as the first institute in Britain set up to cater for those with developmental disabilities in 1847.Footnote ¹⁴ These sessions pivoted around (recorded) discussions of shifting (and now offensive) terminologies, reading patient medical records, and studying maps of the asylums (including the establishment of photographic rooms).Footnote ¹⁵ Particular attention was given to the history and photographic records of the ‘Epsom Cluster’ – the five London County Council psychiatric institutions established in this historic market town between 1899 and 1924 – which in its geographical concentration and patient population (more than 10,000 residents) is remarkable as the largest complex of its kind in Europe.Footnote ¹⁶ Among the materials arrayed for consultation were some of the very first wet-plate collodion photographs taken in British psychiatric institutions, such as those from Surrey County Lunatic Asylum generated by the ‘father of psychiatric photography’ Hugh Diamond,Footnote ¹⁷ and the diagnostic and recruitment portraits produced between 1855 and 1868 by Earlswood’s medical superintendent, John Langdon Down (after whom Down’s syndrome was named).Footnote ¹⁸ As leading figures in the moral treatment movement,Footnote ¹⁹ the photographic ‘specimens’ they generated and publicly circulated embodied the paradox of the ‘continued stigmatization of asylum patients by reducing them to their psychiatric diagnosis … [while also potentially] humanis[ing] the subjects to their viewers, thereby conveying the humanity of suffering’.Footnote ²⁰ As we discovered, the camera was and remains a powerful tool with a pivotal function in medico-psychiatric discourses but it also offered a means of producing highly expressive portraits that experimented with artistic techniques and evoked empathy.Footnote ²¹

As the Freewheelers learnt more about the lives of people confined to these ‘total institutions’, including the ways in which medical diagnosis and treatment has changed (for example the shift in understandings of epilepsy from a psychiatric disorder to a disability),Footnote ²² we looked for a life story, or motor or neurological disability, echoing our own experiences.Footnote ²³ In guided research through the medical histories in the archive, we were invited to ask questions (many of which could not be answered) about patients’ lives before admission to the hospitals, their experiences and treatment there, and we tried to find out, or draw some ‘empathetic inferences’ through visitor records for example,Footnote ²⁴ about their families, pathways to the asylum and survival strategies.Footnote ²⁵ In some cases all the information we had about a person was their glass-plate negative photograph and a name, in others there were casebook records in which a medical officer noted patient symptoms and statements, and catalogued behaviour.Footnote ²⁶ In some instances we could compare this ‘medicalised gaze’ with family admission statements, an occasional patient letter, or ask questions about a mismatched, even contradictory, visual ‘voice’ we might read from the photographs themselves.

The nine Freewheelers who participated in the pilot project also had open-ended recorded conversations about the historic person they had chosen, interwoven with reflections about their own lives. When it came time for their portraits to be taken – under a very strong white light and recognising the need to retain a pose for eight seconds – we all worked actively with Emma to make decisions about how to be photographed and presented. This included how to sit (and whether to use wheelchairs and physical aids or not), what attitudes to present to the camera, what clothing worked best with the special lighting and reactive chemicals, and what facial expressions could be sustained through the longer exposure period of this older form of photography.Footnote ²⁷ These discussions and interactions were filmed by the Freewheelers’ media team, audio-recorded by Laura, and presented in the form of a visual exhibition with audio-only documentary now available online.Footnote ²⁸

Extracts from these recordings, which chart the project co-production and shared responsibilities for historical framing and the creation of audio and visual materials, appear throughout the discussion that follows. These verbatim testimonies allow the Freewheelers to narrate, in their own words and on their own terms, their intentions in co-curating an exhibition celebrating difference, resilience, relationships and self-expression.Footnote ²⁹ As the Freewheelers discovered, one hundred years ago, ‘people like us were defined by what we could not do’.Footnote ³⁰ In contrast, the Freewheelers understand and express themselves by what they can do, the things they proactively make, in how they choose to live, and whom they love and are loved by.Footnote ³¹ In trying to reframe these historical portraits through these lenses, and with these questions and provocations, we intend a restorative repurposing of artefacts undoubtedly originally designed to objectify, to classify, and to contain visually as instruments of a total (but in reality quite porous) institution.Footnote ³²

Assembling and interrogating the archive: medical photography as visual evidence

Medical photography is a rich, immediate, affective, yet problematic fragment or ‘trace’ of the past and a considerable and compelling body of literature has illuminated the ways in which psychiatric portraits – modelled on and influenced by the criminal mug shot and Galton-inspired physiognomic, anthropometric and eugenic analysis – must be situated within the discursive regimes and forms of knowledge production which engendered them.Footnote ³³ As Susan Sontag reminds us generally, ‘photographs were enrolled in the service of important institutions of control, notably the family and the police, as symbolic objects and as pieces of information’.Footnote ³⁴ More than four decades ago in his pathbreaking Seeing the Insane, Sander Gilman cautioned against a ‘naïve reading of madness’ and offered strategies for parsing these issues through the various tropes of psychiatric photography.Footnote ³⁵

More recently, scholars such as Ludmilla JordanovaFootnote ³⁶ and Susan SidlauskasFootnote ³⁷ have grappled with the alluring aesthetics and interpretative ambiguities of this genre. Both historians wrestle with the tension between the psychiatric portrait as a ‘specimen’ and a ‘subject’, recognising that medical portraits were tools for diagnosis yet also media for constrained expressions of subjectivity and self-presentation. A photograph such as Figure 3 carries two electrifying charges – the dazzle of aesthetics and the shock of coercive practice, which may or may not move us to a moral response.Footnote ³⁸ When it is read alongside the medical casebook, we discover the contours of Kate Bailey’s life history: domestic service in Oxford, her first hospitalisation aged seventeen, her marriage and care of a two-year-old and, as telling background to this photograph taken on her admission to the Manor Hospital in Epsom, her committal following the birth of her second child a mere few days earlier. We also see a uniformed nurse – a relatively rare occurrence within asylum photography – making visible the often-hidden human interactions and patient–staff (and nurse and doctor–photographer) dynamic in the production of these images.Footnote ³⁹ Is the nurse captured on silver and collodion, with her seemingly benign gaze and light touch, offering comfort, or restraint, in supporting Kate’s postpartum body through the long exposure? Such images prompt us to ask important ethical questions about voyeurism, abjection, and our own complicity as consumers of these material remnants and reminders of unequal power relations.Footnote ⁴⁰ Confronted with this image of Kate in her vulnerability, registering her vacant stare and wrinkled brow, we are drawn into triangulated view lines – from the nurse to Kate, from Kate to the (unseen) photographer, and then as spectator inhabiting the photographer’s view on these encounters. It is impossible to disentangle these imbricated lines of sight and to decode fully, using Allan Sekula’s evocative description, these ‘fragmentary and incomplete utterances’.Footnote ⁴¹

Figure 3.

Kate Bailey (1882–1914), SHC 6317/3/Box 34 2032.

In his early essay on the explanatory power of historical photographs, Eric Margolis chastened ‘the impatient storyteller within every historian [to pose] a series of questions’ of historical photographs, such as ‘Who took the photograph and why? What are the assumptions of framing, timing, and focus? [and] Why was the photograph preserved?’Footnote ⁴² As Katherine Rawling has compellingly analysed across several pathbreaking studies considering the impossibility of answering many of these questions – including the nature of the dialogue between photographer and sitter (which is also often a doctor–patient power relationship) – asylum casebook photographs are especially complex and ‘their trickiness is a characteristic of the fractured and uneven record of patient experience in the past’.Footnote ⁴³ It is therefore most instructive perhaps to start with the final question posed by Margolis when contextualising the medical records consulted within this project at SHC in Woking. As Julian explained:

Throughout the archival sessions, Julian described driving around the derelict hospital complex of the ‘Epsom cluster’ and, with the tacit consent of security guards installed to deter other ‘asylum urbexes’ (urban explorers), he raided skips and sheds to salvage ledger books and discarded glass-plate photographic negatives from rodents and from squatters burning the records for fuel.Footnote ⁴⁵ Julian reported, in fact, that the people he found sleeping in the abandoned asylums were often former patients, seeking sanctuary in the only place they knew.Footnote ⁴⁶ Extending Jeffrey Mifflin’s invitation (drawing on Paul Ricoeur) to defend the orphan archive, Julian and his team have created and curated this medical collection and work in close collaboration with researchers – chiefly family and social historians – around its interrogation and interpretation.Footnote ⁴⁷

Central to our project was the opportunity to discover more about the physical and material production of these photographs through our own embodied simulation of the mechanical and chemical processes involved in a portrait production. We learned about the diversity of the SHC collection, the idealised moral therapeutic regimes of the modern asylum and the varied socio-historical worlds of patient-inmates.Footnote ⁴⁸ The county asylum records were ‘effectively mug-shots’, on Julian’s assessment, taken on admittance for classification and identification. We can safely infer that these individuals were posed under some duress, wearing ill-fitting clothes which were randomly assigned through the asylum population after laundry day. This rather dehumanising fact also served a diagnostic purpose – if inmates protested that their tiny feet were swimming in enormous shoes or that their rough corduroy jacket was too tight, this indicated that they were ‘becoming self-conscious’, that is presumed curable.Footnote ⁴⁹ Meanwhile the Holloway Sanatorium ledger books which Susan Sidlauskas used for her careful and suggestive analysis contained images of women in elaborate crinolines, reflecting their self-understanding (or their family’s presentation of them) as gentlewomen in distress. We learnt, in practical terms, about the ways in which these sources can be read as a ‘veiled but significant assertions of subjectivity’,Footnote ⁵⁰ especially through the signifiers of class as well as gender.

In contrast, photographers such as Langdon Down of the Earlswood asylum were seeking, through photographic technologies, to reify expressions as ‘natural’ indexes of the mind beneath – the Mongol type, the Aztek type, the cataleptic type – but to draw gesture, movement and affect into this diagnosis too.Footnote ⁵¹ Together with his peers, Down produced what Fraser described as the ‘photographic code’ or ‘schema’Footnote ⁵² of madness and disease, but against a studio backdrop with bourgeois props and accoutrements such as writing desks, floral arrays, furs or jewellery. Nevertheless, the diversity of genres, styles and origins of such casebook photographs have led visual scholars like Rory du Plessis to argue that photographs can ‘accrue meanings beyond any dominant clinical context or narrative’ and need to be ‘located precisely in terms of the individual sitters’ acts of posing, constructions of self-presentation and connections to socio-cultural worlds beyond the asylum.’Footnote ⁵³ In encountering this 1891 archived carte de visite of Florence Thornton (Figure 4), for example, a resident at Normansfield Hospital in Teddington, we contemplate an ambiguous counternarrative to the ‘dark past’ cast of many asylum histories. These histories are often predicated on a progress narrative celebrating a liberal, humane and inclusive present – which can mask new forms of present-day institutionalisation, current structural failures in care, and ubiquitous economic inequalities disproportionally affecting disabled people.Footnote ⁵⁴ Dressed in her luxurious velvet smocked gown, surrounding by the accoutrements of middle-class domesticity (a side table and raffia basket with foliage), Florence looks well cared for and gazes confidently and contentedly at the camera in a manner and self-projected terms that amply exceed a Down’s syndrome diagnosis. Her sparse medical records within the London Archive indicate that she arrived at the hospital aged seven with ‘feeble circulation’, is ‘imitative and affectionate’, and while she ‘speaks very indistinctly … knows what is said to her’. In the ten months she spent in Teddington – if the cessation of the casebook entries is evidence of discharge – she ‘knows most of her letters’, was visited by her mother and aunt on several occasions, and despite a bout of whooping cough was ‘in fair health’ or ‘quite well’. For Florence this was a temporary sojourn, and she was not completely cut off from the outside world, with an extended twenty-two-day absence explained as ‘Gone to Sandown’ (perhaps where her family lived or for a holiday to the races?) recorded in the ledger.Footnote ⁵⁵

Figure 4.

Florence Thornton’s portrait by Fred G. Smith of Kingston, SHC 4645/19/63.

Emma Brown drew our attention to unappreciated tactile, auratic details within such tintype images. The photographer, then as now, leaves their thumbprint or ‘maker’s mark’ on the plate in the process of checking that the wet collodion chemistry has set like jelly on a plate, ready to be exposed to the light. As Emma continued: ‘I love this idea that there’s a bit of their personality in there … as well as the personality of the person who’s had their portrait made.’Footnote ⁵⁶ We discovered that in the past, photographic plates were coated in pure silver, while later processes used silver halide grains – and as a result, the ‘images are higher definition than modern HD’, disrupting our standard, teleological expectations of technological progress. Other unexpected traces of production emerged as we immersively engaged with the technological medium of the photographic negatives and their development. High-resolution digitisation of the glass plates and their enlargement to A1 scale for an associated artistic projectFootnote ⁵⁷ revealed an unexpected secondary image sometimes captured – the silhouetted body of the medical photographer and his outdoor surroundings reflected within the pupil of the sitter (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

a & b Caroline Sophia Appleton (1831–1911), SHC 6317/3 Box 28 698, original and enlarged.

One of the Freewheelers and a project co-lead, filmmaker Gary, commented: ‘it’s almost as if the patient’s eye is a camera’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This produces a vertiginous sense of mise-en-abyme (a picture inside a picture, a story inside a story). The patient was captive within the controlling medical gaze and institutional regimes but also captured that gaze in return – there is a play of subtexts mirroring each other. Engaging with these questions about the conditions of photographic production, the social relationships clustered around their creation, and the interplay of codes and conventions for presenting a ‘healthy’ mind and normative body, such are the seductions and frustrations of appraising how those photographed saw themselves and their confinement. As a project team we surrendered to the allure of intimacy and agreed with Brookes that with ‘the elapse of time … [such] photographs [might] be liberated from typology’ and ‘released … back to individuality: to show us the humanity of people who perhaps did not usually get to pose for a camera’.Footnote ⁵⁹

We would agree that these are ‘raw histories’ that might ‘spring leaks’, in Elizabeth Edwards suggestive conceptual analysis.Footnote ⁶⁰ Or perhaps they are better characterised as ‘haunting presences’, as Vora has conjectured through her creative project refashioning a daguerreotype series of enslaved people.Footnote ⁶¹ There are fraught ethical considerations to be addressed in deploying photographs from medical settings in exhibitions and even in reproducing them within this article – deanonymised and centring faces, and especially the eyes. Yet as Chrisine Slobogin contends, a customised microethics should, in the final analysis, guide decisions about publication and display and we have made our peace with our exhibition design decisions.Footnote ⁶²

Empathetic and embodied engagement with the archive: public history as gift or trespass?

The above raises questions as to who medical records and heritage archives are for and how we can best engage with them. As disabled scholar and ‘institutional heckler’ Lauren Pikó has observed, traditional methods of archival research are simply inaccessible to many of us.Footnote ⁶³ They require high levels of literacy, sustained concentration, sitting for prolonged periods and the ability to handle awkward manuscripts, not to mention sufficient resources to travel and take time off on certain days around often constrained opening hours. Furthermore, the bureaucracy of the archive can feel oppressive to people with lived experience of institutions and care. Archive staff disappear ‘off stage’ into locked storerooms and reappear with white gloves and stern notices about security.Footnote ⁶⁴ For all these reasons, we needed innovative methods so that barriers to archival access might be overcome. These included calibrated travel arrangements and hired minibuses to transport the Freewheelers collectively to the archive, wheelchair-accessible reading rooms, and the display of archival material at adjustable heights, break-out spaces for the portrait taking and talking, and a quiet room in which interviews were undertaken or emotions processed.Footnote ⁶⁵ The SHC’s friendly staff and the wider team anticipated all such adjustments and provided a warm and inclusive group setting where diverse individuals could discuss and perform their findings out loud.

Yet, simulation or ‘restaging’ in some scholarly quarters is regarded with scepticism as a historical method,Footnote ⁶⁶ particularly if the researchers appear to privilege uncritically empathy as a mode of relating to their sources. Sarah Fox, in her insightful survey of the ‘state-of-the-art’ in an earlier issue of Transactions, pointed out that ‘this sense of recognition and connection should be approached with caution, lest it close the gap between “now” and “then”’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This echoes Silke Arnold-de Simine’s criticism of the empathetic turn in public history and his scepticism that emotional responsiveness to imagery resulted in a more ethical or historically informed knowledge of past and present struggles.Footnote ⁶⁸ We are acutely aware that a historian’s empathy can be more akin to trespass than gift but for us ‘restaging’ became a ‘labour of active and therefore critical thinking’.Footnote ⁶⁹ We were informed throughout by historical analysis and abjured a projection of self-regard or self-pity onto nineteenth-century patients. It was precisely through the sensory, embodied, inductive and interactive occasions of engaging with archival material, and then sitting for our own portraits, that we were able to disaggregate clearly what belongs to ‘us’ and what pertained to ‘them’.

The Freewheelers and their supporters learned about the history of asylum photography through our discomfort provoked by bright lights, our struggles to hold a pose, and the way we have personally internalised or rejected the gaze of others. We were mindful of historical and contextual differences. We posed for up to 10 seconds under stable LED lights in the comfort of the SHC teaching rooms, while our Victorian counterparts were forced to sit outside irrespective of the temperature, as natural light was required. Others were subjected to a fierce magnesium flare – the illuminating flash required by the developing process – which must have sounded like artillery fire. We gave enthusiastic and informed consent to be photographed and were able to ask for the care we needed from friends and support workers. As Anna described: ‘I get seizures when I come to new places. Katie holding my hand and Minnie Mouse is in my lap. It really calmed me down.’Footnote ⁷⁰ Katie’s hand of reassurance is visible in Anna’s portrait, in contrast to the nurse in Figure 2 or much more egregious examples in the archive of overly medicated or physically incapacitated patients, deemed dangerous or non-compliant.Footnote ⁷¹ In these highly disturbing historic photographs, disembodied hands might support a weak or tremulous head or prop-up a near comatose body. Looking at the portrait of her photographic pair who holds a tabby kitten on her lap,Footnote ⁷² Anna wondered whether she too needed a comfort object when being photographed (given the case book report of delusions) and about her relationship to her feline friend. Finally, within the project we were able to observe all the various stages of the photographic process, including the ‘magical’ moment when the negative emerges from the developing fluid.Footnote ⁷³ In contrast, our historic pairs, in all probability, never had a chance to see their likenesses. There remain therefore real issues of ethical complicity in our studying and displaying these images never meant to be seen or exhibited in public.Footnote ⁷⁴

The visible effects of decay and entropy on the SHC collection also reinforced a sense of temporal distance and cultivated for the project team a recognition of separation as much as identification. Given the precarious passage of this material to the archive, the casebooks and the glass plate negatives show palpable signs of wear and tear – cracked book bindings and spines, photographic fading, and chips or hairline fractures across the surface of the glass plate negatives. We discovered that this dual feeling of estrangement and familiarity is perhaps integral to the reproduction chemistry itself. Wet collodion photographic processes invert the image, producing a likeness that is more akin to what the sitter sees in the mirror than a modern, conventional photo. Logo brands on our contemporary clothing, for example, were reversed to comic effect! Yet, the way the process reads and reproduces colour and tonality is also profoundly different from modern visual apparatus. The action of time and heredity is more apparent in Emma’s photos – a deepening of freckles and smile-lines, which enhance the character of the face. Blue and green are lightened, endowing people who have pale eyes with a limpid and penetrating gaze. We were reminded of Sontag’s caution that the taking of a photograph might unsettle or violate a sitter ‘by seeing them as they never see themselves’.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Julian reflected, thinking about his own portrait:

Through our own crafting and making, new ways of knowing and revivified appreciations of historical and technological process have emerged, enhancing our ‘visual literacy’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In our sensory, embodied engagement with these historical artefacts, our research seeks to contribute to a creative and emerging field of public history in opening out questions of fixity in historical interpretations and demonstrating the benefits of bringing imagination, play, recreation and re-enactment into conversation with ‘historical fact’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Much as Lepecki has argued about the afterlife of dance and the effect of researching and restaging historical choreography, we agree that in ‘re-enacting we turn back, and in this return we find in the past [artefact] a will to keep inventing’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Sontag and Barthes have also described the power and deathly memento mori quality of the photographic image. For Barthes, portraits have a ‘unique capacity of animation, producing an immediate, “pricking” effect which surpasses narrative emplotment by inducing the viewer to feel despair, compassion, pity or empathy towards the depicted person’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Sontag explored the ‘scandalous effect’ of the immediacy and seeming verisimilitude of the photograph in presenting ‘a thin slice of space as well as time’ in which the moments before and after fall off a precipice, along with their capacity truly to edify an audience.Footnote ⁸¹ We encountered these feelings of uncanny slippage, ghostly apparitions and time travel too – Emma confessed to an ‘eerie feeling’ in using the nineteenth-century glass plate negatives pairs chosen by the Freewheelers to create a ‘positive’ photographic image for exhibition. For her this was almost like reanimating past lives, producing photographs of people who had not posed for her and ‘did not choose to sit in my studio’.Footnote ⁸² This is reminiscent of Sontag’s warning: ‘To photograph people is to violate them … it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.’Footnote ⁸³

The Freewheelers, as shape-shifting performers themselves, complicated Sontag’s iconoclasm through the process of composing their photographs and voicing their accompanying narratives. Influenced by Garland-Thomson’s influential essay on the ‘Politics of Staring’, our photographs deployed the visual rhetoric of realism to minimise the differences between the viewer and the viewed – not only in the dialogic production (between Freewheeler and their historic pair) but also through the photographic exhibition afterwards (within the photographic diptych displayed and viewed by the gallery spectator). Nevertheless, within this realist framing, playful self-presentation strategies could draw upon diverse photographic repertoires encompassing the lucid, the wonderous and the sentimental to choreograph ‘a social dynamic of looking’ and illuminate ‘the culturally fabricated narrative of the body’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Sonas, a dancer, gathered many ‘slices’ of his personal space-time into one portrait by precariously balancing nine hats on top of his head for his portrait. ‘I am a man with many hats, each has their own story. All of my hats are my favourite, so I wore all of them’, he explained (see Figure 6).Footnote ⁸⁵ He paired his image with the enigmatic music hall personality Byron Pedley who was ‘responsible for a great deal of merriment’ during his stage career before he was eventually confined to Long Grove Asylum in Epsom .Footnote ⁸⁶ Despite being a ‘mere one hatted man’,Footnote ⁸⁷ as Karl jokingly observed, Byron Pedley with his bowler hat and jaunty cane captivated Sonas because it was reminiscent of his own stage role as the Ballet-Master in a Freewheelers’ production. Whereas the history team had been scouring the archives to try to unearth a person of visibly discernible African extraction to correlate with Sonas’s Ugandan family heritage – recognising too that the experiences of disabled people of colour are critically undertheorised in the existing literatureFootnote ⁸⁸ – Sonas disarmed our presumptions about identity categories and found a bowler-hatted entertainer who, like himself, was most himself when performing to the gallery. On seeing the ‘KING’-brand on the last hat in his pile reversed in the image produced by the photographic process, Sonas quipped: ‘I’m the GNIK of Freewheelers!’Footnote ⁸⁹

Figure 6.

Sonas, reproduced with permission of ©Emma Brown.

Peter, who is renowned as an expert wheelchair user, decided to climb out of his chair when photographed, drawing the viewer’s attention instead to his bright blue eyes and his hands clasped (as he put it) ‘like bird’s wings’. Reacting to his portrait, he reflected: ‘In the photo, I feel like an able-bodied person. If I got my way, I’d walk like everyone else. Still, I outpace most joggers with my wheelchair.’Footnote ⁹⁰ By contrast, Anthony chose to wear markers of his physical impairments (high-tech hearing aids and spectacles) in one portrait, and to dispense with them altogether in another. In the first portrait co-created with Emma, Anthony’s spectacles are blacked-out like sunglasses – another peculiarity of the wet collodion process – giving Anthony the cinematic allure of ‘a mafia boss’ in his sharp pin-striped suit, or perhaps a spy holding a blue-tooth conference with his associates.Footnote ⁹¹ Through their performances for the camera, both Anthony and Peter move away from a focus on ‘disability’ towards a tacit critique of ‘ableism’, which Kumari Campbell defined as ‘the enforcement of a constitutional divide between perfected naturalized humanity and the aberrant, the unthinkable … and therefore non-human’.Footnote ⁹² Through their relationships with communications and adaptive devices, Anthony and Peter might present as hybridisable and cyborgical, pushing against the boundaries of ontological categories. Or, as another Freewheeler put it with elegant simplicity: ‘That photograph shows who I can be, though it might not be who I am every day.’Footnote ⁹³

At other times, the Freewheelers asked for their diversity to be simply acknowledged. ‘Sometimes people think it’s nice to say to me, “You don’t look disabled”, or “I don’t see you as disabled”, but actually [dramatic pause] just let people self-identify.’Footnote ⁹⁴ This chimes profoundly with recent critiques of an ableist gaze that views disabled people’s achievements as heroic inspiration porn for the able-bodied, or as projections towards a new-eugenics future in which disability and disabled people have been abolished.Footnote ⁹⁵ Our participants alluded to the unpredictable spectrum of talent, disability, self-sufficiency and interdependence that many of us sit within – or will do at some point in our lifespan.Footnote ⁹⁶ As Jamie reflected, with characteristic humour:

From this perspective, it was a natural decision for Jamie to request that Flossie, as a sometimes extension of himself, also have her portrait taken along with other members of the group. But despite the things he listed that he ‘can’t do’ such as reading, Jamie exists in his own field and on his own terms: ‘I can sing, I can dance, I can perform in front of thousands of people, I can make films, I can work with young people.’

Once produced, we found the portraits of the Freewheelers company members ‘revelatory’ and ‘more akin to paintings than photographs’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Benjamin also noted this quality within the early photographic process, which obliged people to concentrate their very life and being as ‘the procedure itself caused the models to live, not out of the instant, but into it; during the long exposure they grew, as it were, into the image’.Footnote ⁹⁹ We want to relate this co-creative presentational act by the sitter to ‘composure theory’ – a methodological tenet of oral history praxis – and our experiences collecting the Freewheelers’ oral narratives. Over three decades ago, Graham Dawson first drew attention to the double meaning of the word ‘composure’ (denoting both comfort and coherence) to explain how oral history narrators attempt to create a presentation of themselves that sits well within their social group.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet we suggest, contrariwise, that it is sometimes also psychologically desirable to strive for ‘discomposure’, that is, a narrative in which our subjective experience does not align with the dominant discourses surrounding us, or when we resist consistent self-presentation. Peter did this by consciously stepping out of his wheelchair and reflecting on the reasons why. This, in turn, made us look more closely at those early twentieth-century patients who had pointedly looked away from the camera, who refrained from compliant smiling, or who deployed a somewhat haughty, schoolmarmish ‘up-from-under’ gaze to register resistance or obscure the schema of disease or madness that was imposed upon them.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Unresolved questions remain about how we can perceptively ‘read’ the emotional registers of these expressions or movements.Footnote ¹⁰² There will always be an ambivalence about how deliberate or transgressive such acts of ‘discomposure’ really were. Freewheeler Rachel, whose family history has uncovered a great-great-grandmother within a Victorian psychiatric institution, had multiple vectors for her imaginative projections and connections. Discussing her historic pair Susan Burton, she pondered: ‘You can see from the dark rings around her eyes that Susan really grafted. She was a domestic servant.’Footnote ¹⁰³

Adaptive and inclusive oral histories: addressing ableism and embracing ‘crip time’

Since the 1960s, oral history has exerted a claim to be the method par excellence for uncovering and amplifying the voices of marginalised, oppressed and under-represented outsiders, movements and collectives.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The praxis certainly has a strong appeal to us because of its emphasis on experience, subjectivity, reflections on positionality, and its aspiration to sharing authority between narrators/collaborators.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yet the experience of working with the Freewheelers has also left us wondering whether certain oral history tenets, routinised ethics processes and related qualitative research shibboleths are unreflexively ableist and need greater interrogation to facilitate more inclusive co-production and public history activities.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

From the outset, Alana’s negotiation of her university’s ‘high risk, full ethics clearance’ procedures illuminated some sharp paradoxes, ambiguities and conundrums. Bureaucratic, tick-box ethics forms start from the presumption that self-definition as ‘disabled’ necessarily impairs capacity for informed consent – despite, for example, differences among the Freewheelers (and between the authors too) ranging across – or combining – cognitive and neurological conditions with physiological, age-related and mobility issues. The genesis of this project from the initial idea and through the initiative of the Freewheelers themselves, and their intimate co-production throughout as makers, viewers, sitters, interlocutors, researchers, recorders and interpreters, was occluded – and frustratingly discounted – in a process that assumed, paternalistically, academic authority, while essentialising vulnerability and underestimating and homogenising disabled people’s capacities.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Paradoxically, as the flip side of this, the university information sheets and consent forms which were mandated and intended to safeguard ‘informed consent’ – lengthy, full of technical jargon, and sometimes bewilderingly legalistic in content – had quite the opposite effect. As we all know, but hardly ever confess, for most oral history interviewees such forms are completely impractical and highly alienating – not just for those with differing levels of literacy or learning disabilities, as Walmsley wryly observed!Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Moreover as Ristock and Pennell have underlined from a feminist social worker perspective, ‘beyond the province of such [ethics] committees is a whole range of power issues that the researcher must be attentive to’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Drawing upon Laura’s expertise working with younger people and diverse community groups, and following consultation with UEL’s Rix Centre, we were able to mobilise (in addition to the formal consent form) an illustrated Easy Read guide.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Our ethical commitment to actual informed consent therefore required a duplication of processes and resulted in a blizzard of paperwork for further verbal explanations and signatures – which is far from ideal. It seems to us to be highly desirable that university ethics processes should be more tailored, customisable, and allow for such adjustments in the form and format of these permission rubrics to streamline and simplify processes. In this they would do well to draw on the insights of community-engagement practitioners who have experience with inclusive and affirming microethical practices, including verbal consents, that truly facilitate understanding and informed agreement, rather than counterproductively compounding incomprehension and creating further barriers to participation.

Many oral history primers, clustered around a life history methodology, encourage novice interviewers to adopt a chronological approach – starting with childhood (as if childhood were always innocent and easy!) – and then guiding interviewees through points of transition and key markers of attainment within the ‘collective scripts’ of a presumed standard life passage: education – paid employment – child-rearing – the accumulation of wealth for the next generation.Footnote ¹¹¹ Those working intensively on memory and life writing would question such an organisational premise; agreeing with the author Eudora Welty that

If this is true for most of us, we should then be especially wary of what Elizabeth Freeman calls ‘chrononormativity’ when creating life narratives with disabled or queer people. As she explains and expands, chrononormativity is ‘the use of time to organise individual human bodies toward maximum [economic] productivity’,Footnote ¹¹³ and privileges the able bodied, heterosexual and university educated. Waged work schedules, calendars and clocks are in fact ‘a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces seem like somatic facts’, and this process habituated and entrains entire populations into narratives of progress, acquisition and individual development that are sanctioned or regulated by the state.Footnote ¹¹⁴

As Lucy Delap has perceptively illustrated by examining employment, for some disabled people these identity categories and life stages, with adjustments, might apply or translate.Footnote ¹¹⁵ But for many others, including most of the Freewheelers, other or alternative conversation starters and life markers, including their activities within the theatre company over the years, are more meaningful. Jamie observed of his archival pair, Walter Cartright, who left five children after dying from the syphilis and GPI that brought him to the Epsom cluster – ‘that’s pretty cool. It means his legacy is passed on.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ This led to questions about ‘who is forgotten’ and who has a safe place in our domestic photo albums or national museums. However, the conversation about Walter’s children had pathos for Jamie, who was on an ‘emotional rollercoaster’ – coming to terms with personal bereavement and regaining his confidence through performing with his non-biological ‘family’.

‘Us and Them’ sought to represent people whose lives were ‘in excess’ or outside commonly circulating narratives, and the lives of our Freewheeler collaboratives, in dialogue with their archival pairs, do not always follow chrononormativity.Footnote ¹¹⁷ So how might we facilitate the creation of life testimonies and stories that encourage and support deviation from seemingly predictable, taken-for-granted linear narratives (inciting incident, climax and ending) and ‘species typical’ life cycles?Footnote ¹¹⁸ How might ‘crip time’, abjuring chrononormativity in the ways outlined by Samuels, and other innovative adjustments to praxis accommodating neurodiversity, impact on oral history praxis?Footnote ¹¹⁹

As experienced oral historians, both authors were on new territory with the Freewheelers – an ambitious and inventive company of media makers and performers – as we jointly shaped narratives and co-produced soundscapes from the portrait production process. Some of our (provisional) methodological learnings include:

• • A high supporter to participant ratio is necessary. The unpredictability of life with a long-term condition, chronic pain or mobility issue meant that many Freewheelers missed at least one workshop session. We constantly needed to keep this in mind, to create flexible plans, and to meet individuals where and when they were available.

• • Choice and customisation of recording modes. In our project, these included private one-to-ones, recording in pairs or small groups, as well as ‘active tape’ and soundscapes of the tintype photographic process. Varied styles of recording allowed people to reveal their character through their gestures, actions, jokes and interactions with each other, as well as more traditional sedentary life narratives. In the audio piece that was produced to accompany the exhibition, we hear Jamie gently cajoling his canine partner Flossie with a succession of ‘low value’ and ‘high value’ treats. We hear Anthony’s sense of mischief and his ‘techie-ness’ as he uses his own recording devices to capture and playfully intervene in Emma’s photographic process. Participants often placed themselves within a broader ‘Freewheelers’ collective memory, forged through years of collaborative performance and art making together. For example, Jamie commented on his spectacular choice of outfit:

This is reminiscent of Barkley Brown’s statement, ‘There is no need to decentre anyone in order to centre someone else, one has only to constantly, appropriately, pivot the centre.’Footnote ¹²¹

• • Adjust interviewing techniques. This was particularly important around interviewee anxiety and fears about comprehension, fluency and the intelligibility of audio-recordings. Our participants know each other well and seamlessly offer peer support, reinforcing statements made by members with speech impairments to aid understanding (of the interviewer and intended documentary audience).Footnote ¹²³ When someone was struggling with an open-ended question, the authors offered friendly prompts – these might be seen as ‘closed or leading questions’ and therefore discouraged by traditional oral history primers designed for neurotypical humans. The need to broaden out oral history methodologies to encompass a collectivist perspective and acknowledge inter-subjectivity has long been advocated by historians of gender.Footnote ¹²⁴ In congruence with the findings of other disability scholars, we too discovered that loosely configured ‘focus groups’ can offer a supportive, conversational environment to enhance participation and offer validation for those whose voices are more difficult to hear in an individual or highly focused setting.Footnote ¹²⁵

• • Creatively experiment for co-ownership, co-authorship and joint interpretation. We innovated with iterative feedback loops and collective research interpretation – pushing well beyond more standard techniques of the return and checking of transcripts or provision of the completed publication – to foster shared ownership and ongoing, active consent.Footnote ¹²⁶ Reflecting on their experiences as researchers with learning difficulties, three members of Hackney People First wrote about self-advocacy and their introduction to research methods, analysis of the results, and co-authorship of an article through a process of assemblage of their own thoughts, words and illustrations with the help of a doctoral student collaborator.Footnote ¹²⁷ In discussing their post-project learnings (captured as audio by On-the-Record), and filming each other, our Freewheelers collaborators offered important reflections, findings and historical interpretations, which we have interwoven – using their own words – into this analysis. These insights and testimonies also formed the basis of the exhibit labels displayed with their paired portraits, which were read to and signed off by everyone photographed before being exhibited. Laura compiled an audio-feature for the exhibition for those who might find reading text display labels difficult (or impossible) and the exhibition was hung in the middle of the wall – wheelchair height – inverting standard assumptions about ‘eye level’. We also hosted a public roundtable event during the exhibition, featuring the Freewheelers in a Q&A, at which the project team spoke about their experiences of having their portraits taken, the historical surprises encountered and the reasons for choosing their ‘friend in the archive’. This was also recorded and has intimately informed our evaluations.

More conceptually, we have also come to realise that we need to tune into ‘crip time’ in our oral histories, which, according to Alison Kafer, ‘bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Disabled people may take more time (or less time) to get on the train, to articulate themselves, or to complete bureaucratic paperwork. We do things at a different pace, as one of the authors can attest. To give another example, Peter, an intelligent and reflective thinker diagnosed with cerebral palsy, used comedy to disarm:

As Peter confirms, stutter and disfluency can arise if we feel that there is ‘temporal expectation’ or pressure from someone else to get our words out. What we are advocating, drawing on the poet JJJJJerome Ellis and Peter from Freewheelers, is that unusual speech patterns are welcomed as a shared experience of temporal possibility – ‘the disfluency’ is held and nurtured between the interlocutors.Footnote ¹²⁹ When we edited the audio piece accompanying the exhibition, we consciously did not edit or elide any of Peter’s pauses, because slow listening is itself rewarding.

Additionally – as will be evident within this article itself – crip time destabilises some conventional ways of structuring and writing academic histories. As disabled scholar Ellen Samuels reflected, ‘crip time is time travel’. Chronic illness can ‘cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Without wishing to romanticise the real difficulties of living with fluctuating levels of pain and energy we, along with Samuels, welcome creative ways of working and the mental flexibility it can afford. We found that some of our participants were able to gather themes across the linear span of space and time. In her one-to-one interview, Rachel was shuttling back and forth in a novelistic fashion that is reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s ‘continuous thread of revelation’Footnote ¹³¹ or Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’.Footnote ¹³² Rachel said that she was ‘so relaxed’ in her portrait sitting with Emma that she ‘drifted back in time’ and described having reveries in institutional settings as a youngster herself, when she would imagine the mischief her great-great-grandmother had caused in the workhouses and asylums.Footnote ¹³³ Rachel recalled speaking aloud in boring classes – ‘I wonder what Gran’s up to now?’ It is telling that Rachel’s great-great-grandmother was released from the asylum because her intellectual potential was seen and Rachel fluidly connected this family legacy to her pairing with Susan – who was described in her medical case notes as ‘an articulate, eloquent and educated woman’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Here the conjunctions and disjunctions in personal and familial narratives, alongside those of our friends in the archive, converge and diverge.

Conclusion: doubling, the double negative, and positives

Some time ago Alan Sekula observed that the rise in medical photography in the late nineteenth century coincided with the urge to ‘separate self from other’, echoing a wider societal fascination with doppelgängers, shadow selves and split personalities – the rejected parts of ourselves that we cast off as fearful or aberrant. Charting the ‘honorific and repressive poles of portrait practice’, he identified the asylum archive as ‘the shadow archive’ of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the non-white, the female.Footnote ¹³⁵ For Sekula, ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ were defined, dynamically reconstituted, and diametrically juxtaposed in opposition, antithesis and scapegoated othering.

Our project departs from this well-worn horror story of the double, by embracing our historical ‘pairs’ and the messages that they might carry. As we have shown, the Freewheelers’ choice of a historic person related to shared passions, or points of differentiation, as much as a doubling of diagnoses, in an attempt to slip free of an unrelenting ‘medicalising gaze’ and imaginatively enable patients to ‘stare back’ while acknowledging spatial and temporal parallels, loops and double images.

Nevertheless, even when an unabashedly epidemiological lens was deployed by a disabled artist, a blurring of vision and an identification, and a distinction, would be held in tension. A good example was Sam, who had a complex relationship with Mabel Florence Dawson (Figure 7). Mabel was admitted to the Royal Earlswood institution at Redhill for those with developmental disabilities in 1863 at the age of 2½ years, and her case notes record that she measured 2 foot 4 inches and weighed a mere 25 pounds with a weak back. The medical registrar also noted her fondness for music and her improved health and capacity for some speech when she was discharged, three years later, as a six-year-old child.Footnote ¹³⁶ It was this common love of music that first caught Sam’s attention: her family used to share their house with Ewan and Kirsty McColl, hosting as visitors Pete and Peggy Seager. Additionally, Sam was also able to diagnose Mabel retrospectively (described in her medical notes as a ‘congenital idiot’) as suffering from spina bifida. Sam confesses that some of her loved ones do not want to discuss the condition of her neural tubes and was fascinated by the changes in how her condition was described in nineteenth-century diagnoses compared to now. In her portrait, she made a point of displaying her Medic-alert bracelet bearing the words ‘spina bifida and arrested hydrocephalus’. As she reflected: ‘This is novel – not many people have these, and no-one had them in the Victorian times.’Footnote ¹³⁷ On this same hand, in a second dual portrait she had taken with Sonas (Figure 8), it is also possible to see an engagement ring – for as Sonas explained to Emma, ‘Sam’s wearing my ring – she’s my fiancée.’Footnote ¹³⁸

Figure 7.

Mabel Florence Dawson (1860–n.d.), SHC 4645/6/12.

Figure 8.

Sam and Sonas, reproduced with permission of ©Emma Brown.

It was important to the Freewheelers to share stories about their romantic partners in the exhibition, countering the desexualisation of nineteenth-century patients and the still-prevalent narrative that disabled people are cared for, rather than being care-takers or lovers themselves.Footnote ¹³⁹ In his oral history, Anthony also conjured himself as a pair/double with his girlfriend: ‘I’m always there for Lily, whenever she wants to talk, no matter the time of night.’ Unlike his archival pairing (George Frederick Gilbert whose short life was dominated by epilepsy),Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Anthony (also epileptic) lives in supported housing and pursues his passions for Lily, bike-riding, digital technology, performing and horse-riding (with his regular horse so in-tune with its rider that the animal predicts the onset of a seizure).

In The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud suggested that the double might have another meaning; one that is pertinent for our project: ‘There are all the possibilities, which had they been realised, might have shaped our destiny, and to which our imagination still clings, all the strivings of the ego that were frustrated by adverse circumstances, all the suppressed acts of volition that fostered the illusion of free will.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ This chimes with Peter discerning ‘an alter-ego’, as much as a historic predecessor, in his nineteenth-century pairing with Frederick Tarrant: ‘Frederick shows the other side of me. It’s as if, when I’m not at Freewheelers, I get all poshed-up in my dinner jacket to go out. No-one else knows this about me.’Footnote ¹⁴² One might assume that Peter was mistaking Frederick’s pauper’s garb for a fine suit – feeding Sontag’s fears that spectatorship trumps scholarship. Yet alternatively, we feel that Peter saw something in Frederick’s photograph: the luxurious moustache, jaunty raised eyebrows and wry smile; something more than the ‘dull’ ‘imbecile’ described in his Epsom asylum cluster medical records.Footnote ¹⁴³

We invite others to examine closely the images of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, side by side; their tones and their orientations inverted by the photographic process. The physical and metaphorical multiplication of pairs or the ‘doubling of negatives’ invites, for us, a creative analogy to the syntactical use of a ‘double negative’ in the English language. Two negations in a sentence can lead to an affirmation, or an understatement, but they can also lead to ironic juxtaposition. The effect is to produce a lilting uncertainty about the meaning of the paired terms. It introduces doubt about meaning and categorisation; the rewarding and the worrying aspects of a lack of clarity. The ‘Us and Them’ project left us as authors, and our wider collaborating team too, wondering – what did we miss in the photographic archive and where are our blind spots? Which subtexts, ‘muted channels’ or visual cues did we fail to see or hear?

What we did learn in our partnership with disabled creatives in reimagining asylum portraiture resonates with an emerging strand of critical, community-engaged scholarship and arts-based public history. This growing consensus underlines the effectiveness of creative methods and co-production in challenging the medical model of disability and amplifying voice and visibility.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ For us, this entailed revisiting and actively refashioning our freighted and fraught visual sources and exploring the public engagement possibilities of historical empathy and ludic re-enactment to counter ableism and social stigma. The need to move beyond ‘normative ethics’ through an embrace of crip time, exploration of the conceptual framework of ‘discomposure’, and adapted methodological praxis around consent and sharing authority are fruitful preliminary insights applicable to other disability arts research projects.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Newly secured Heritage Lottery Funding will enable us to expand on and extend these findings through the creation of a further forty-five portraits, the production of a film and large-scale exhibition, and the generation of a tranche of in-depth oral history testimonies undertaken by the Freewheelers themselves.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

There remains so much more to see and hear. And more to learn and feel too. Our project, with its reclamation of asylum photographic processes and its products, feels like a black box of composites and contradictions. Light and dark. Subject and specimen. Conscious and unconscious motives. Memory and forgetting. Gift and trespass. Abled and disabled. A black box system that is now beginning to take flight and which holds the possibility, through the lens of Freewheelers Theatre and Media Company, of an aerial view on Surrey’s vibrant network of long-standing mental health and disability-arts organisations, which are the present-day legacy of its understudied psychiatric past.Footnote ¹⁴⁷