Visualizing Emotions and the Emotional Economy of Science

The study of emotions attracted renewed interest in the nineteenth century. Following Duchenne de Boulogne’s Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (1862) and Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), physiologists, psychologists and neurologists turned to photography and other visualization technologies to understand the correlation between emotions, facial expressions and muscular and nervous movements. Studies by Charcot and others such as the psychologist Georges Dumas and the physiologist Charles Émile François-Franck employed different photographic technologies, from stereography to chronophotography, to produce visual observations of emotional expressions. These experiments, often performed on asylum patients, sought to identify normal and pathological expressions of emotions. Through the analysis of prints, albums and other photographic material, this presentation will examine the emotional economy of science underpinning medical studies on emotions. In particular, it will focus on the parallels between emotions considered as normal and pathological in scientific studies, and the emotional style at the time. From this perspective, pathological emotions were not only medically but also socially and culturally abnormal. Researchers and photographers, therefore, were invested in obtaining successful experimental results which mirrored and supported with scientific evidence their own emotional regime. Photographic visualisations played a key role in this process, working both as scientific evidence of the physiological nature of emotions and cultural objects that identified normal and abnormal subjects according to the emotions they expressed.