JTF (just the facts): Co-published in 2023 by Landskrona Foto (here), Breadfield Press (here) and Witty Books (here). Softcover, 12 x 18 cm, 200 pages, with about 80 black-and-white photographs and drawings. Includes an essay by Benedetta Casagrande. Design by Tommaso Tanini. (Cover and spread shots below.)
Comments/Context: As both of her parents are photographers, the Dublin-based multidisciplinary artist Róisín White grew up surrounded by cameras, photobooks, boxes of photographs, and family albums. Following in their footsteps, she has also pursued photography. In addition to making her own work, White collects photographs and medical textbooks, and her interest in medical history, and in particular the treatment of women, led to her project Lay Her Down Upon Her Back. After winning the Landskrona Photobook award, it was published as a photobook last November.
The book uses photographic evidence to examine the history of “medical mistreatment and uneven power relations between male doctors and female patients.” To construct her narrative, White brings together a variety of materials, including her own photographs and drawings, and found archival materials from old medical textbooks, flea markets, eBay, etc. The title of the book references the belief that women should take to bed in times of mental or physical ill health, and that women are the most vulnerable flat on their backs in encouraged stillness. It stresses a lack of understanding of how women’s bodies work and how male doctors perceive female pain.
Lay Her Down Upon Her Back is a pocket-sized book that is easy to carry around, browse, and read. A black-and-white photograph of a woman sitting in a chair with her eyes closed and her right hand raised (she looks like she is in trance) takes up the entire cover (the endpaper on the inside shows a male doctor in his chair, most likely part of the same photo). The title and the artist’s names are placed in all caps on the spine. Inside, most images appear full bleed, and the image pages are interrupted by lighter spreads with short texts. An essay by the photographer and writer Benedetta Casagrande titled “Towards a Hysteric Photography” closes the book. Overall, the book feels good to hold and browse.
In particular, White investigates the legacy of the 1880s treatment known as the Rest Cure. Developed by the American neurologist Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, it was a strictly enforced regime of at least six weeks of bed rest and isolation, without any physical, creative, or intellectual activity or stimulation. It was used to treat mental health conditions, like hysteria and anorexia nervosa, and was prescribed almost exclusively for women. Unsurprisingly, this treatment was also meant to subdue outspoken or independent women. The bed rest cure was sexist. It stands as a striking example of medical misogyny, and it has been discredited since the late 1930s, yet its legacy in women’s healthcare remains today.
White’s project was shaped by “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a feminist short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in which the author describes her own experience using an account of a nameless young woman, narrating the isolation and madness that the treatment provoked. The narrator soon becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and goes completely mad.
Lay Her Down Upon Her Back opens with a sequence of images that seems to represent a woman on a bed, showing fragments of the room mostly looking up, from a slightly skewed perspective. There are shots of the ceiling, wallpapers, ceiling light, all shot in a hazy gray atmosphere. These are followed by a spread with a sentence reading, “I remember I would just lie on the floor and wait for the feeling to pass.” Throughout the book White pairs images and text, creating a more layered narrative.
Some of the images come from first edition texts on how to administer the cure. There are also close up shots of wallpaper, a row of male doctors with their heads cropped, a calendar entry reading “not a good day”, peeling paint on a ceiling, etc. The writing on one of the spreads complements these images, “I spent so much time in that bed, I could draw all the cracks and stains on the ceiling from memory.”
Closer to the end of the book, there are a number of photographs shot by White, close up shots depicting a woman on a bed in awkward and almost impossible poses. Abstract free drawings by White also appear throughout the book, and represent her intuitive response to the work. Through this artistic engagement, they connect the present to the historical legacy of medical mistreatment and coercive denial of women’s agency.
As a photobook object, Lay Her Down Upon Her Back is a small, yet brilliant publication. It definitely encourages conversations about women’s bodies and their treatment, and ultimately reclaims control of this important subject. White doesn’t claim to offer any resolution, she rather “articulates our anger” in this well-conceived contemporary protest book.
Collector’s POV: Róisín White does not appear to have gallery representation at this time. Collectors interested in following up should likely connect directly with the artist via her website (linked above).
