Bernhard Cella’s panopticon of convalescent men - across a century - demonstrates an iconography of medical progress and the typology of mise en scène, of those who will soon return to everyday life. It also reveals a break in its respective production, which runs counter to the image of vital, intact and inviolable masculinity. Every photographic image inevitably carries the moment of the accident, the wound, the war injury, and thus the trigger and the precise point in time associated with it, at which something inevitable happened, but at which no camera was present. The calm and deceleration, the impartiality and light-heartedness for the lens cannot hide it in their insistence. Or as Paul Virilio put it: images are ammunition and cameras are their weapons.
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