The State of the Art: Marketing Eyesight in the 21st Century:
Solo exhibition Edith Gallery UCOL Whanganui 12 – 23 October 2009.
In ophthalmology, as with many branches of medicine, the health professionals and the companies supplying the tools of their trade have a close relationship, a co-dependence.
The ophthalmology industry is dominated by a handful of large, multinational companies that heavily subsidise ophthalmic conferences and teaching symposia and exert a significant influence on surgical practice.
In recent years, some of the emphasis in ophthalmology has shifted from the treatment of blinding disease to the marketing of novel procedures promising perfect, spectacle free vision. Such procedures are mostly carried out on the healthy eyes of the young and affluent whose need for glasses has now been re-categorised as a ‘disease’. For the most part surgery is safe, effective and highly profitable but often needs ‘enhancing’ over the years hooking the recipients into a lifetime of specialist ophthalmic care and exposing them to an unquantifiable risk of late complications.
This series of photographs was taken at an international conference on cataract and refractive surgery. The trade display occupied 26 massive halls of a major European convention centre. The commercial stakes were high, the technology hugely expensive and the research barely keeping pace with the introduction of innovative procedures.
The ophthalmology industry is dominated by a handful of large, multinational companies that heavily subsidise ophthalmic conferences and teaching symposia and exert a significant influence on surgical practice.
In recent years, some of the emphasis in ophthalmology has shifted from the treatment of blinding disease to the marketing of novel procedures promising perfect, spectacle free vision. Such procedures are mostly carried out on the healthy eyes of the young and affluent whose need for glasses has now been re-categorised as a ‘disease’. For the most part surgery is safe, effective and highly profitable but often needs ‘enhancing’ over the years hooking the recipients into a lifetime of specialist ophthalmic care and exposing them to an unquantifiable risk of late complications.
This series of photographs was taken at an international conference on cataract and refractive surgery. The trade display occupied 26 massive halls of a major European convention centre. The commercial stakes were high, the technology hugely expensive and the research barely keeping pace with the introduction of innovative procedures.
Installation
