Psykiatriens bilete i det digitale rom: Ei kritisk undersøking av digitalisering av historiske pasientfotografi, med utgangspunkt i arkivet etter Valen sjukehus, frå perioden 1910-1955

Abstract

A large amount of the historical photographs from the Norwegian psychiatry are already made public and are freely available on various digital platforms. But since the digitization process of the Norwegian archives today is given high priority, it can be assumed that the public access to the visual representations from the medical field will increase drastically in the years to come. This, despite of the fact that today’s guidelines are strictly protecting the privacy of persons with impaired informed consent capacity. Thus It will be important to facilitate the historical images to be met in a conscious way when they hit the digisphere. One way to facilitate this is to increase awareness and knowledge about the images of psychiatry. This far, the visual history of the psychiatric institution has not been a subject of research in Norway, as the lack of scientific and critical literature from this field reveals. Archives are dynamic and material systems of knowledge, which ables us to access and produce information. But what then, if the photograpic objects appears more or less invisible, both in the medical archive’s own hierarchy and for the human agents interacting with this material? In this paper I argue that this field’s photographic objects is not only a victim of a biased hierarchy within the medical archives, but also of the Norwegian archive regulations. Hopefully, this paper can help illuminate some aspects of these processes as they are happening, and by doing so, establish a renewed interest in the images from the Norwegian psychiatry. In this thesis, I examine how the mental institution in Norway and its inmates was represented, mainly through photography and film, during the first half of the 20th century. The subject of my analyzes is the photographic archive from Valen Hospital in Kvinnherad, Norway.