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FLEMMING KOEFOED THE STRUGGLE AGAINST DISEASE31.10 - 12.11.1975
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST DISEASE
While collecting these pictures and selecting them I tried to note and analyse my reaction to each of the photos. The real theme of the series is the emotional reaction this documentation of an everyday reality produces - a reality which everyone hopes to escape but which almost everyone experiences sooner or later.
One's first impression is characterized by fear and uneasiness or by a kind of dissociation, but this is followed by an understanding of the cool objectivity and the high level of science and professional ability found in this reality. There is also a feeling of hope and expectation - that the examination proves there is no real danger, or that treatment is finished and convalescence and rehabilitation have started. But more important, I think, is the fact that the pictures reflect the inexplicable, the relentlessness of causality (or destiny). Certain persons at certain moments may be afflicted and unintentionally taken into a closed world where all everyday problems disappear and everything is concentrated on elementary, existential problems and questions. This is a world characterized by great distance between the sterile and technologically perfect apparatus and the personal experience of disease and treatment. It is a world full of insecurity, pain and fear, but also of hope, primitive joy - and grim humour. There is an indispensable but secret solidarity between the patient, the nurse and the doctor, just as there are enormous barriers between them. The language, the behaviour and the instruments used by the doctor seem incomprehensible, mysterious and ritualistic, the ideas of the patient also being characterized by superstition, fetishism and taboos.
For anyone who is not yet a patient, the fear of disease (of pain and annihilation) often creates a similar superstition and results in more or less reasonable individual measures to escape or postpone disease. More effective prevention might be achieved, of course, if prophylactic measures were instituted in society as a whole, but such rational thoughts are weak when pitted against the mythology connected with disease and the struggle against disease.
Flemming Koefoed, October 1975
The exhibition was held at the Galerie S:t Petri, Lund, Sweden in October - November 1975
