Beyond the Present Body: The Insurgency of the Image
Luiz Armando Bagolin, Luiz Armando Bagolin
May 2026
Renate Bertlmann photographed herself pregnant, in a wheelchair, wearing a wedding dress, “Schwangere Braut im Rollstuhl” (The Pregnant Bride), 1976. The black-and-white image overlaps three social conditions that should not converge: motherhood, disability, matrimony. Each of these positions prescribes a specific role to the female body that excludes the others. The bride is not actively a mother; the mother is not disabled; the woman in a wheelchair is not nuptial. This photograph denounces through literality, by showing the simultaneous imposition of three incompatible narratives upon the same body. It institutionalizes an impossibility that society refuses to name. […]