An Individual State
Pain―the final frontier. I imagine a Venn diagram: of the mind, of the body, and an intersecting zone where the, at times, unspeakable lives. For anyone who has experienced pain, and particularly chronic pain, what is produced can be likened to) and Susan Sontag () have investigated the conditions and outcomes of pain in terms of how it shapes our identity. Scarry acknowledges the way in which pain ‘unmakes’ the world and the self, situating the individual in question beyond their identity, beyond language. Image-making has been known to produce new ways of depicting the world (telescopes; microscopes). Could it be then, that photography could offer a method through which to ‘hang’ the embodied experiences of pain?
