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This article seeks to examine the emergence of the image of hysteria that originated at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris in the late nineteenth century and has since been transferred across new generations of phototexts through ekphrasis. It is first shown how this stereotypically feminine and sexualised image was initiated by the medical tome Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière - an effect that belies the physicians' original intentions - and is then taken up in the public imagination by the surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon before emerging in Georges Didi-Huberman's 1982 critical text Invention of Hysteria. Didi-Huberman's monograph offers insight into how persistent this image becomes, even taking shape in discourses that attempt to undermine it. Didi-Huberman furthermore highlights how developments in photographic technology have contributed to the shaping of hysteria. Finally, this article considers how the figure of the hysteric appears in J. M. Coetzee's 2005 novel Slow Man in the character of Marianna. The manner in which she is depicted presents an ekphrasis that can be matched to the vision of hysteria that began with the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière, thereby showing how this histrionic and gender-stereotyped iteration of hysteria from the nineteenth century remains a readily accessible mode of expression.

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This Special Issue on 'Other Lives of the Image' arises from an international workshop held at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC, 3-4 October 2019. The co-editors thank all participants and additional contributors to this issue, as well as their reviewers. We acknowledge the generous funding support of the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory (Unique Grant 98911). This Introduction takes up a number of issues from the workshop but also addresses longer-standing debates within the Visual History research platform at UWC, including the frequent omission of issues of race and African presences within the global debates on photography. The discussion of Nadar's portrait of de Brazza in this Introduction was therefore not part of the workshop and Special Issue brief, but a means of entry into these more encompassing questions. The authors thank Tristan Guilloux and Manuel Charpy for their kind input on de Brazza's portrait, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) for its reproduction here. 1 Link posted on 6 February 2020, uploaded by the online journal African Heroes on its Facebook page at https://www.facebook. com/africanheroesmagazine/photos/le-violeur-p%C3%A9dophile-pierre-savorgnan-de-brazza-officier-de-la-marine-fran%C 3%A7aise-/1315719891946791. On the 2006 reburial of the remains of de Brazza and his family in a purpose-built mausoleum in Brazzaville as a negotiation between France and the Congo Republic (as well as Gabon and the Central African Republic), see F. Bernault, 'Colonial Bones: The 2006 Burial of Savorgnan de Brazza in the Congo' , African Affairs, 109, 436, 2010, 367-90. 2 Amongst many other activities, Félix Tournachon or Nadar produced an array of portraits known as the 'Panthéon' of prominent public figures and intellectuals in his studio in the 1860s. The date of de Brazza's portraits suggests his son Paul Nadar produced these particular photographs. De Brazza's image went on to appear on cigarette packets, soap wrapping and other consumer items. See Bernault, 'Colonial Bones', 376 fn 24.

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