"Seeing Cellular Debris, Remembering a Soviet Method" Dr Ann Kelly (University of Exeter)

A microphotograph of a mosquito taken in the 1962 in a mountain laboratory in what was then Tanganyika provides a prompt to consider the socio-political salience and affective power of scientific images. Drawing inspiration from anthropological work on photographic practices, the paper excavates the context of the image’s production—both the geopolitical machinations of the global malaria eradication program and the domestic research station—to apprehend the relationship scientific work and lives. As much souvenir as ‘epistemic thing’, the microphotograph provides new directions in thinking about the materiality of memory in tropical medicine.