What was the longest and harshest medical quarantine in modern history and how did people survive it? Beginning in 1866, men, women, and children in Hawai'i suspected of having leprosy were removed from their families. Most were sentenced over the next century to lifelong exile at an isolated settlement. Thousands of photographs taken of their skin provided forceful, if conflicting, evidence of disease and disability for colonial health agents. And yet, a competing knowledge system of kinship and collectivity emerged during this incarceration. An Archive of Skin, an Archive of Kin shows how exiled people pieced together their own intimate archives of care and companionship through unanticipated adaptations of photography.
