Portrait and Scan

Abstract

This article is an ethnography of color and black-and-white in medical images of a particular kind—prenatal ultrasound—in a particular place—Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is also a meditation on histories and theorizations of color. It moves from the discourse and practice of pregnant women, family members, and doctors about color and black-and-white, to political and intellectual histories of color in Cambodia and in anthropology, to Buddhist ontologies of pregnancy and life. Across this diverse terrain, the notion of the image-affect conveys how images stimulate affective responses in viewers and how images affect their referents. A method of listening to and for image-affects helps us to understand how people relate to the elemental instability of images and the instability of beings to which images refer and with which they become.