Disability In Popular Photography Essay

In the article “Seeing the Disabled: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, she talks about people with disabilities and how people view disability as a negative aspect of society. She starts off her essay speaking about the importance of photographs but eventually transitions into talking about disability. Thomson’s most important topics can be found at the end of the essay. One of the major points in the reading that she wants the reader to know is that people need to stray away from viewing disability as negative. Thomson mentions how it’s a cultural practice to see disability as different: “...it is one of the cultural practice that creates disability as a state of absolute difference, rather than as

People constantly look for differences in those who stand out rather than looking for similarities. Instead, these differences make people feel bad for them, giving them this sense of sympathy which is bad, “Sympathy literally diminishes the wonderful, replacing awe with pity or the delight of the “cute” (354). People with disabilities would be categorized under the “them” category since they are different and don’t meet the typical human standards. When people are different they are considered to be unordinary, Thomson doesn’t want the reader to think that of people with disabilities stating, “Imagining disability as ordinary, as a typical rather the atypical experience, can promote practices of equality and inclusion that begin to fulfill the promises of a democratic order” (Thomson 372). What is being said in this quote is that people need to stop seeing “disability” as unordinary and that doing so will help people start making the “unordinary” feel part of the community promoting equality. Disability has been created to be seen out of the norm rather than normal, which is a major