Patricia Kühfuss

This work in progress is a visual research into the German healthcare system and the political, cultural and scientific structures which allow the commodification of the sick body. Through varied strategies of visualization I create an anatomy of this complex yet essential part of society. 

Photography provides a tool to map different actors and interests within the system, while at the same time the implications of photography within the same system are interrogated.  

Photography as medical imaging separates physically representable symptoms from patients and their lived experience, and by doing so creates 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 wellbeing of both patients and medical staff (and therefore society at large) at stake.

Cover image by Dafni Melidou