Experiments With People

What do our photographs really say about how we see each other? In Picturing Disability, sociologist Robert Bogdan invites you to look again at the familiar faces that populate postcards, advertisements, and art galleries, and to ask: what hidden messages about disability do these images carry? Bogdan argues that how we have photographed people with disabilities from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century reveals not only artistic conventions but also deep cultural assumptions—who belongs, who is different, and who is worthy of pity, fascination, or admiration.

The book’s central claim is that photographs of disability are social constructions, shaped by the institutions, ideologies, and values of their times. Each image genre—from freak show portraits and begging cards to poster children and family snapshots—represents a distinct rhetoric of disability. Bogdan’s method combines visual sociology and disability studies to show how photographers, organizers, families, and institutions all participated in forming these ways of seeing.

Why the Lens Matters

Bogdan begins by explaining that photographs don’t innocently record reality—they construct it. Every setting, pose, costume, and caption reflects choices made by photographers and by the social systems surrounding them. The same person could be seen as a heroic citizen in a family portrait or as a pitiable child in a charity appeal. The conventions of photography act as visual rhetoric, guiding interpretation much like language does in writing.

This approach builds on social constructionist theory (as in Erving Goffman’s work on presentation and stigma) rather than critical or purely aesthetic theory. Bogdan sees the study of disability imagery as a way to understand the social meanings that both limit and liberate people with disabilities. Photographs don’t just record difference; they help create the cultural frameworks that define disability itself.

A Gallery of Social Worlds

Each chapter explores a unique photographic world with its own audience and purpose. Freak show portraits turned human suffering into spectacle, while begging cards framed disability as a marketing tool for personal survival. Charity advertisements and poster children created sentimental images that equated cure with generosity. Asylums developed their own visual aesthetics—a mix of official pride and hidden horror. Later, eugenics photography made disability into a pathologized category, claiming that appearance itself revealed moral or mental defect.

From there, Bogdan moves to art photography, where celebrated figures like Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon reframed disabled people as symbols of alienation and anxiety. Advertising campaigns and movie stills played their role in popular culture, turning abnormality into either mockery or menace. And finally, family snapshots and studio portraits—what Bogdan calls “citizen photography”—offered a radically different image: people with disabilities simply living ordinary lives.

Why This History Matters

For Bogdan, examining disability images isn’t a matter of nostalgia—it’s a way to confront how cultural power operates. Each genre reflects who controls representation. Freak show managers, eugenic scientists, or medical authorities dominated early portrayals; only late in the twentieth century do family members and disabled individuals themselves become active agents. These shifts mirror larger social changes—from segregation and charity to inclusion and normalization.

Bogdan’s expansive survey challenges you to think about how photography transforms people into types. A caption like “The Armless Wonder” or “Cripple for Life” solidified the idea that identity could be reduced to a condition. Yet citizen portraits remind us that disability can coexist with everyday normality—people at work, in love, at home, surrounded by family. Seeing these diverse photo rhetorics side by side compels a reconsideration of who we think people with disabilities are.

Looking Forward

Ultimately, Picturing Disability is a call for a more reflective visual culture. The book closes by suggesting that present-day disability rights movements, human-service professions, capitalism, and evolving technologies continue to shape the way we picture difference. Bogdan’s work asks you to pause before any photograph and to question what story it tells—and whose story it erases.

“Every image of disability reveals its makers as much as its subjects—it tells us how a culture defines normality.”

By tracing these intertwined histories, Bogdan helps you see how humanity itself has been filtered through a camera lens—and reminds us that changing how we picture disability may be the first step toward genuinely seeing one another.

Bogdan begins his photographic journey with the gritty and glamorous world of nineteenth-century freak shows. These performances, often billed as 'sideshow wonders,' blended entertainment, deception, and exploitation. They were the first major source of disability imagery in popular culture, and they crystallized the contrast between fascination and fear.

The Aggrandized and the Exotic

Freak show photography came in two distinct modes. In the aggrandized mode, exhibits were depicted as refined, capable, even noble citizens. Charles Tripp, “The Armless Wonder,” posed in a Victorian parlor, drinking tea with his toes. Ann E. Leak Thompson displayed her embroidered Christian mottos and posed proudly with her husband and child. These images promised that disability could coexist with grace and competence—a selling point that appealed to middle-class audiences.

The exotic mode took the opposite route. It emphasized strangeness, foreignness, and monstrosity. “Aztecs from Mexico,” “Pigmys from Abyssinnia,” and “Pinheads from Zanzibar” were popular fabrications promoted by New York photographer Charles Eisenmann. Individuals with microcephaly (small head size) were claimed to be descendants of ancient races or savage tribes. Costumes, props, and false backstories turned physical difference into colonial spectacle. As Bogdan notes, this exoticized gaze equated disability with primitiveness.

Fraud and Entertainment

Behind the velvet curtains lay deception. Freak shows often employed 'gaffs'—fake conjoined twins sewn into girdles or legless women whose limbs were hidden under elaborate fabrics. Audiences were charmed into believing the extraordinary. These photos were sold as souvenirs, functioning as advertisements for the shows themselves. Eisenmann’s cabinet cards captured a mix of performance and misdirection, where a pose served both evidence and illusion.

Bogdan interprets this imagery as early mass-media exploitation. The disabled body became a commodity, yet participants sometimes exercised agency: many exhibits, including Tripp and Bowen, profited from selling their own likenesses. They consciously shaped how they were seen, balancing pride against showmanship. In contrast to the pity-driven charity photographs that would follow decades later, freak portraits presented disability as spectacle—not suffering.

From Humiliation to Identity

Yet these theatrical pictures remind you that representation is rarely straightforward. Some performers transcended exploitation to craft strong personal narratives. Eli Bowen, “the legless wonder,” documented his family life over the years, leaving a counter-history of stability and dignity. His portraits with his wife and four children showed him not as a monster but as an independent husband and father. Bogdan reads this as an early act of self-normalization—a private reversal of public stigma.

Freak show photography set the groundwork for future genres of disability imagery. It defined visual patterns—the centered body, the formal pose, the named anomaly—that medical photography and charity advertising later adopted. It also exposed society’s contradictory impulses: to elevate difference as miracle while reducing it to a moral curiosity.

“Freak portraits were less about people’s bodies than about audiences’ desires—the longing to look and the comfort of superiority.”

Bogdan’s treatment of the freak show era isn’t just history—it’s a cautionary mirror. The commercialization of disability as entertainment may seem like a relic of the past, but the cultural craving for spectacle still lingers wherever difference draws attention without understanding.

If freak photography dramatized difference, begging cards brought it down to the level of daily survival. These small, printed or photo postcards were distributed by beggars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to solicit alms. Bogdan treats them as miniature social documents, revealing how people used disability to construct legitimacy, guilt, and exchange in face-to-face encounters.

The Script of Compassion

Begging cards often featured plaintive verses and blunt descriptions: “Am perfectly helpless—my legs are both off above the knees.” Harry T. Petry’s card combined a sorrowful portrait with a poem invoking Christian charity. The phrase “Live and Let Live” paired survival with morality. These texts reframed begging as lawful exchange: the donor was “purchasing” the card and earning spiritual merit.

Across thousands of examples, Bogdan identifies recurring motifs—religious appeals, family dependency (“my children’s only support”), and patriotic identity among veterans. The imagery invited donors to feel pity yet also respect, portraying beggars as unfortunate workers rather than passive mendicants. Begging became a micro-performance of moral worthiness, echoing the old British distinction between the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor.

Agency and Deception

Bogdan’s sociological lens avoids treating beggars only as victims. He shows them as strategists navigating a delicate economy of sympathy. Some fabricated stories; others exaggerated injuries or posed with borrowed props like crutches and bandages. Fraud mingled with truth—not as moral failure, but as adaptation. “All beggars share a degree of fraud,” Bogdan writes, because survival depends on performance. This insight reframes disability not as misfortune alone but as a role negotiated within capitalist norms.

The cards also normalized a visual language later used in charity advertisements: pathos, Christian imagery, and the transformation of pity into donation. What distinguishes them is intimacy—the beggar handed the image directly to a passerby, creating immediate eye contact and shared discomfort.

From Street to Marketplace

Eventually, organized charities replaced individual beggars. Agencies promised scientific distribution of aid, discrediting the street solicitor. Bogdan sees this as a shift from personal encounter to bureaucratic mediation. The human face disappeared behind logos and institutions. Yet in today’s crowdfunding and social media appeals, the begging card’s intimacy returns—photographs of illness and need circulate again, combining personal narrative with visual plea.

“Pity was the currency; the photograph authenticated the transaction.”

Through these fragile relics, Bogdan reconstructs a world where disability was simultaneously stigma and livelihood, compassion and commerce—a tension that persists whenever images of suffering are used to generate empathy and action.

By the mid-twentieth century, pity became professionalized. Bogdan’s chapter on charity photography traces the rise of major organizations—from the Good Shepherd’s Home to the March of Dimes—that used strategically designed images to raise funds. Here, disability turned into a marketing tool for generosity, and the poster child became a national symbol of hope and redemption.

The Birth of Sentimental Advertising

Religious orphanages had long used portraits of “crippled children” to appeal to donors, but the twentieth century introduced Madison Avenue polish. The 1940s and 1950s brought cheerful children wearing braces or using wheelchairs—Linda Brown smiling into the camera in a March of Dimes campaign, or Terry Landsburger posing with actor Robert Young. These children personified innocence transformed by charity.

Bogdan notes that the compelling power of such imagery lay in paradox. The child was portrayed as both helpless and curable. The act of donation was equated with physical healing: “Look! I can walk again.” The donor didn’t just give money—they participated in a miracle. This emotional appeal aligned with postwar optimism and the growing belief in medical progress.

Celebrity Compassion

Photographs of famous figures multiplied the campaigns’ reach. Calvin Coolidge posed with disabled veterans; Elvis Presley held a crutch-bearing child gazing adoringly into his eyes. Marilyn Monroe’s fashion-show appearances with Easter Seal children drew press attention. Politicians and entertainers turned empathy into publicity, reinforcing a hierarchy where nondisabled benefactors emerged as saviors.

This union of celebrity and charity entrenched a cultural narrative: disability as public problem, cure as communal triumph. Bogdan compares it to propaganda—the moral cleanliness of giving contrasted with the unspoken reality of ongoing stigma. Poster children became sentimental icons, not individuals with agency.

Before and After the Miracle

Many campaigns used “before-and-after” photographs to visualize progress. The Shriners Hospitals published images of a frail child held upright by a nurse beside a second picture showing the boy standing unaided. This visual rhetoric of transformation served as proof of efficacy and reaffirmed the donor’s moral self-image. Bogdan reminds us that rehabilitation narratives mirrored broader social policies—transforming physical normalization into a metaphor for social belonging.

“The poster child’s smile was designed to make pity palatable.”

Yet as disability rights activism emerged in the 1970s, this imagery came under critique. Jerry Lewis’s telethon, once the pinnacle of compassion marketing, was condemned as “pity-mongering.” Bogdan’s analysis reveals how good intentions can perpetuate harmful stereotypes—and how our visual habits of charity may still rely on sentimental difference rather than genuine equality.

Bogdan’s exploration of asylum photography offers one of the most haunting sections of the book. He contrasts three visual regimes: postcards of order and beauty sold to tourists, institutional propaganda showing productivity and cleanliness, and muckraking reportage exposing overcrowded and brutal conditions.

Pictures of Serenity

Early twentieth-century postcard views of asylums—Minnesota State Asylum, Kansas State Hospital, Letchworth Village—appear serene. Grand architecture rises over manicured lawns, fountains spray cheerfully, and captions proclaim “One of the finest in the US.” These postcards were part of civic pride, not shame. They sanitized confinement into picturesque landscape. The people—often mentally ill or intellectually disabled residents—were absent or reduced to distant shadows.

Bogdan explains that photographers followed conventions used for schools and colleges, not prisons. The goal was marketing, not documentation. Asylums represented social progress and compassion rather than isolation and neglect, celebrating institutional benevolence.

Propaganda and Professional Photography

Inside the walls, however, public-relations photographers like William Allen or Margaret Bourke-White crafted official images for annual reports. Bourke-White’s 1930s work at Letchworth Village depicted well-dressed children weaving at looms or raising the American flag. These posed compositions radiated discipline and hope, convincing politicians that their funds built humane environments. The artistry itself—balanced light, symmetrical framing—served as institutional rhetoric. In contrast to freak or charity imagery, clarity and professionalism signaled order.

Muckraking: From Pride to Purgatory

The façade collapsed when reformers like Burton Blatt and photographer Fred Kaplan smuggled cameras into institutions in the 1960s. Their book Christmas in Purgatory revealed naked, neglected residents packed into filthy wards. Bogdan recalls how hidden cameras captured “hell on earth.” Blurred, shadowed images conveyed chaos and dehumanization, reversing the institutional aesthetic of order. These photographs ignited outrage and fueled the deinstitutionalization movement.

“Within the same walls, one camera built legitimacy; another exposed atrocity.”

Bogdan’s comparison of postcards, propaganda, and exposés teaches you how visual framing creates moral narratives. Clean corridors and flag-raising ceremonies reflect civic reassurance; dimly lit suffering photographs evoke reform. Together, they demonstrate photography’s dual capacity—to conceal and to reveal—and challenge you to question every image of care.

Few parts of Bogdan’s book are as chilling as the chapter co-written by Martin Elks on clinical and eugenic photographs. Here, photography becomes pseudo-science, a tool of control rather than compassion. Between 1900 and 1930, eugenicists used portraits of the “feebleminded” to legitimize sterilization, segregation, and even euthanasia.

The Camera as Diagnosis

Eugenicists believed that moral and mental defects manifested in physical appearance. They photographed patients frontally and in profile, using rulers, callipers, and labels such as “Case C, Cretinoid” or “Low-grade Imbecile.” The setting was stark, the lighting clinical. Subjects were often nude, stripped of individuality. These images turned people into specimens—a visual taxonomy of normality and deviation.

Bogdan and Elks dismantle the illusion of objectivity behind these photographs. Measurements and captions were presented as empirical data but functioned as confirmation bias. Photographs didn’t prove feeblemindedness—they created it. The supposed “scientific realism” masked moral judgement and hierarchy.

Classifying Humanity

Eugenicists like Henry Goddard and Martin Barr arranged photos by categories: “Idiots,” “Imbeciles,” “Morons.” Each type displayed distinct visual codes—open mouths, blank eyes, or asymmetrical ears. Group shots contrasted “mongols” (people with Down syndrome) with “racial Mongols,” cementing racist conflations of disability and ethnicity. This comparison mirrored colonial photography’s obsession with bodily difference.

A notorious case was Deborah Kallikak, presented as the “world’s best known moron.” Her tidy portrait in a dress with a book conveyed what institutionalization could supposedly “fix.” Goddard juxtaposed her with retouched images of her family’s “degenerate” rural relatives, arguing heredity determined morality. These manipulated photos became powerful propaganda for sterilization laws.

Science Turned Rhetoric

Bogdan argues that these clinical photographs replaced the freak show’s sensationalism with bureaucratic cruelty. Instead of a carnival tent, the backdrop was a state hospital. But both used the body as spectacle. Through visual 'proof,' the eugenics movement disguised discrimination as science—an enduring warning about the persuasive power of images.

“The camera became an instrument of judgment—it didn’t reveal truth; it manufactured inferiority.”

By tracing how photography served ideology, Bogdan shows that pictures of disability are never neutral. They embody the intersection of prejudice and technology—a lesson still relevant amid contemporary debates about genetic imagery and medical surveillance.

After the grimness of institutional and scientific photography, Bogdan ends his survey with images of everyday life—a quiet revolution in representation. These 'citizen portraits' restore humanity to people with disabilities, showing them not in isolation but within families, workplaces, and neighborhoods.

Normality as Context

Rather than hiding impairments, these photographs integrate them naturally. A boy with Down syndrome sits on a window seat amid lace curtains; a woman in a wheelchair poses on the edge of her cornfield beside robust crops. These are not staged by charities—they were taken by relatives and local photographers as keepsakes. Disability is visible but not featured. The composition centers on family belonging, not difference.

Bogdan calls this “normal photographic rhetoric,” shaped by conventions of domesticity—front porches, tidy clothing, loved pets. Here, the person is a citizen first, and their impairment simply another trait. Such ordinary portrayal contrasts sharply with freak and medical genres where the body dominated the frame.

Love and Connection

Recurring motifs include family unity and affection: mothers cradle children with disabilities, couples gaze tenderly at one another, siblings smile beside wheelchairs, and even pets share the frame. Bogdan’s meticulous cataloging of over forty such photos—from romantic encounters to grandmothers holding grandchildren—demonstrates that intimacy reshapes perception. Disabled subjects become participants in shared emotion, not objects of observation.

Objects of Identity

Beyond people, Bogdan notes how ordinary possessions—books, tools, dolls, musical instruments—anchor identity. They shift focus from impairment to personality. An amputee postman stands proudly beside his mailbag and horse-drawn cart; a girl with leg braces poses with her dog. These artifacts affirm selfhood beyond medical labels. Even when disability is partly concealed, the photos convey agency rather than passive existence.

“When pictured in ordinary ways, people with disabilities stop being symbols—they become neighbors.”

Through citizen portraits, Bogdan reveals photography’s potential for social inclusion. These images prefigure the normalization philosophy of Wolf Wolfensberger and the later inclusive imagery promoted by disability rights movements. They remind you that the most radical image of disability may be the one that treats it as unremarkable.

Bogdan closes Picturing Disability by turning from history to reflection. After cataloging more than a century of photographic genres, he asks you to reconsider what it means to 'see' disability at all. Each image—from freak cards to family portraits—reveals not just visual style but the society that produced it.

Genres and Social Forces

Bogdan groups photography into distinct modes: spectacle, charity, science, art, and everyday life. Each emerged from its own institution—circus, welfare agency, asylum, laboratory, gallery, or home—and carried its ideology of normality. The evolution of these genres parallels changing cultural narratives, from exclusion to inclusion. Where freak shows turned difference into entertainment, citizen portraits reclaimed it as domestic belonging.

He reminds you that broader social forces—industrialization, capitalism, human services, and racism—shaped these portrayals more than any individual photographer. Technological innovation allowed images to circulate widely; moral progress slowly redefined their meaning. Photography became both historian and participant in the social construction of disability.

Complexity and Conundrum

Not all photographs fit neatly into categories. Bogdan presents perplexing examples: a disheveled man beside a well-dressed companion—are they brothers, employer and worker, or actors? A child with hydrocephaly posed lovingly in a garden, captioned “Master Handsome.” These moments defy easy interpretation, reminding us that visual meaning is contextual and emotional. Sometimes compassion, not convention, defines a picture’s purpose.

The Modern Lens

Bogdan concludes by connecting past to present. Disability imagery today—from advocacy campaigns to personal photography—still inherits old rhetorics of pity, heroism, or miracle. He argues that awareness is the key to change: learning from history enables ethical representation. Just as citizen portraits humanized their subjects, contemporary media can adopt inclusive practices that depict people with disabilities as complex individuals rather than symbols of tragedy or triumph.

“A good photograph can make social science clearer, and good social science can make every photograph more humane.”

In the end, Bogdan’s work expands your vision beyond the frame. To picture disability well is not just to capture bodies—it’s to understand histories, contexts, and relationships. The challenge he leaves you with is both scholarly and moral: to see difference without distortion, and to let photographs remind us of our shared humanity.