Abstract

In order to challenge the iconographic understanding of fetal ultrasound scans – included within the photographic paradigm –, I discuss the intertwining of visuality, scientific knowledge, and technology. I argue that image-making in ultrasound practices has a photographic dimension that ought to be questioned in light of the visibilization processes that bring some not-optical inputs into visual outputs. It is the dialogue between post-phenomenologist and enactivist accounts that help us in disentangling the otherwise neglected relations between image-making and sense-making, which ultimately unveils contemporary obsession with visualizing living matter into the human being, for shaping a figure – the fetal one – which does not exist if not in the technological mediation. The question «how does it arrive that a machine is a moral vehicle?» represents the other side of the exploration of image-making, I argue that the «baby pictures» respond to moral and ethical reasons that are embodied in the machines themselves