Seeing Cellular Debris, Remembering a Soviet Method

Abstract

A 1962 photomicrograph of a mosquito taken in what was then a Tanganyikan mountain laboratory offers a prompt to consider the social salience and affective power of scientific images. Drawing inspiration from anthropological work on photographic practices, this article excavates the diverse geopolitical and domestic contexts of the image's production, consumption and circulation, so as to grasp the relationship between scientific labors and lives. As much souvenir as “epistemic thing,” the photomicrograph provides new directions in thinking about the materiality of memory in tropical medicine.