Sheffield’s third Festival
of the Mind (15-25 Sep 2016) will be kicking off this week with a full
programme of varied events across the city.
Included in the programme is a project called In a Dark Wood: Words and Images
of Mental Distress Across a Century.
This collaboration between Archive Sheffield, Sheffield City
Archives, and Professor Brendan Stone (University of Sheffield) will explore
changing perceptions of mental distress/illness by drawing both on contemporary
accounts and on the photographic archive of South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum (later
Middlewood Hospital) in Sheffield. A
collection of large-plate glass negatives, kept in the Sheffield City Archives,
and almost certainly unseen in the last hundred years,
offer a powerful window into a different era of medical care. 
The history of photography in mental hospitals is a long
one, dating back to the work of Hugh Diamond in the mid-19th century. Diamond
was a doctor, photographer, and the Superintendent of Surrey County Asylum. The
practice soon became widespread, and was based on the idea that the
photographic image could provide an accurate and scientific insight into
‘insanity’. In Diamond’s influential 1856 paper ‘On the Application of
Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena of Insanity’ he claimed
that the use of photography negated the need “to use the vague terms which
denote a difference in the degree of mental suffering”, and that photographic
images indicated “the exact point which has been reached in the scale of
unhappiness”.
The photographing of patients was predicated on a desire
to ameliorate suffering. Nevertheless, what may strike us now is the inadequacy
of an approach which focused on surface appearance. As we look at these almost
100 year-old images from the old Middlewood Hospital, we might reflect on the
stories and voices of those we witness, and wonder how many were untold,
unheard. There is no identifying information included with the images, nor any
explanation as to why they were taken.
These anonymised images will be presented alongside
contemporary audio reflections on the nature of illness/distress and care from
people currently living with mental health problems. The combination of images
and sound will represent a kind of dialogue across time which will generate insight
and provoke thought about differing perceptions of mental health, as well as
drawing out resonances. Visitors to the exhibition will be invited to leave
their own thoughts and reflections in response to the exhibits.
The exhibition In a
Dark Wood will be showing at Bank Street Arts from 15-25 Sep 2016 as part of the Festival of the Mind.
Date: Thu 15 - Sun 25 September 2016
Time: 11am-4pm, except 11am-9pm on Wednesday 21 September
Location: Bank Street Arts, 32-40 Bank Street. Sheffield,
S1 2DS
Entry: Free
© Glass negative images from the collections at Sheffield City Archives (Sheffield Libraries), [early 20th cent.], reference: NHS3/5/26.