Haunted Maternity Ward

To create this composite digital image, which I’ve crudely dubbed “Haunted Maternity Ward,” I first over-enhanced the contrast of a digital photograph of a new mother, baby, and sister in a maternity ward. Then, I cut and pasted in clips of three children at the Bourke Street Baby Clinic’s Alice Rawson School for Mothers and a dog with a backpack from two additional digital images. Using the spot-healing tool, I blurred the edges of the various layers to create a merging effect between the background image (the maternity ward photo) and the four clips, which created somewhat of a halo around each pasted in child and the dog. The dog fragment stands out for its more yellow pigment, a quality that most likely reflects the original photo paper, as well as its position in the far right.

One question in particular arose for me after considering the product of this Photoshopping process: Have I ruined all possibility for this composite image (and its original three images) to provide any historical evidence? Is it possible for “Haunted Maternity Ward” to carry any authority that the original archival photographs do? Baron argues, about film and audio, that “when temporal and intentional disparity are uncertain, the viewer is faced with a constant struggle around how much authority to give the indexical recording. This struggle is crucial to our understanding of history, because it both depends upon and determines what we give the status of archival—and, thus, historical evidence” (30). Surely such as problem could apply to still images too. If someone gazes as “Haunted Maternity Ward” and cannot locate the original contexts (times and places, and the narratives that belong to them), they may not give any part of the original photographs authority as historical evidence. The yellow pigment of the dog alone may cause a viewer to distrust the cohesion or unity of the three original photographs. Thus, the process of cutting up the digital material may also have cut up any status of the original three images as “archival.”