Deborah Padfield. Perceptions of Pain. 2001-06. Composite photographs. Various sizes.

Padfield’s composite photographs such as Pain Like Ice were made in collaboration with patients at the INPUT Pain Management Unit at St. Thomas’ Hospital in order to visualize their invisible pain beyond standard diagnostic measures such as the pain scale. Padfield, a sufferer of chronic pain herself, incorporated both methodologies and results in subsequent series such as face2face, in which chronic pain patients and clinicians collaborated on photographic collages of the patient’s pain. In Pain, speaking the threshold, Padfield selected 54 of the 1000+ images that had been co-created with patients to print as “pain cards” for use in the clinical space as an entrypoint for conveying and empathizing with incommunicable experiences of pain. Padfield’s approach to collaborative image-making plays with familiar negotiations of agency in both clinical and studio spaces by subverting the passive role endemic to both medical imaging and portrait-sitting. Here, the co-production of imagery pauses the unilaterality of mastery, holding an open space for a bilateral reckoning with the unknown.