Facing pain: Dr. Hans Killian's photo book, Facies dolorosa.

摘要

A black and white portrait of a young woman: her round head is propped up on a pillow. The weary face, which is fully turned toward the camera, speaks of profound demoralization. Her overshadowed, strangely commanding eyes draw in the gaze of the onlooker. A thickly swollen throat, a partially exposed chest, and her face fill three quarters of the image, diagonally. In the indistinct white background, one discerns the shadow of a window through which daylight enters-light from the outside world which this woman, stricken with Hodgkin's disease, might never have seen again. Another image shows the emaciated head of a middle-aged, unshaven man resting on a cushion. With the head turned slightly away, his gaze passes the viewer, deeply absorbed in an inauspicious distance, a realm of pain, desperation, or perchance, expectation of things to come. This man with inoperable stomach cancer is bound to die. Nothing in the neutral, slightly blurry backdrop of hospital linens and cubicle curtains claims the viewer's attention; her scrutiny is directed exclusively toward the subjects' faces (See figures 1 and 2).