Images of an illness : a case study of Albert R. Stone's tuberculosis photographs

This master's thesis is a case study of sixteen black-and-white photographs of tuberculosis treatment facilities in Rochester, N.Y., by local photographer Albert R. Stone. They appeared in the Rochester Herald in as two photo essays, one in 1909 and the other in 1923. The aim of my research was to provide contextual information about Albert Stone and the Rochester Herald, tuberculosis and its treatment, and how the disease was portrayed photographically, and ultimately, to determine whether Stone's photographs were typical of tuberculosis-related images. I examined them in the context of other sanatorium images and based on statements about the conventions of sanatorium photographs made by Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence in Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America Since 1840, and concluded that they were representative of photographs of sanatoriums made in the early twentieth century.