The intimate contract of photography: Haleema Hashim's practice and its afterlives

This paper offers a case-study of Haleema Hashim’s photography, undertaken between the 1940s and 1970s and recently rediscovered, to examine the practices and afterlives of domestic and amateur photography in India. Haleema was the only woman to photograph in her family and community of Kutchi Memons, Sunni Muslim migrants long-settled in the port city of Cochin. In 2014, her striking images of occasionality and everyday life were collected by her great-grandson, shared online, and exhibited at the Kochi Muziris Biennale. While drawing appreciation for ‘making visible’ an ‘intimate’ history that especially foregrounds women’s lives, they raised objections amongst family members who were anxious about the implications of such visibility. They thus emphasise the politics at play in the production, transmission, dispersal and/or appropriation of photography. To reflect on this politics, this paper directs Ariella Azoulay's conceptualisation of the photographic encounter, which takes place between the photographer, camera, photographed subject and spectator, towards the spaces and relations of the (post)colonial household and its archives. Rather than a ‘civil’ contract, photography is read as an ‘intimate’ contract, where intimacy is the constant and contingent blurring of ‘public’ and ‘private’, the formal and the informal, the immediate and the archive

Post-exercise parasympathetic reactivation and sensibility to hypoxia

Introduction Exposure to hypoxia leads to several reactions of the organism, which try to compensate the reduced oxygen level in the blood. Acute response is characterized by an increase in pulmonary ventilation (Hypoxia Ventilatory Response, HVR) and in cardiac output (cardiac response to hypoxia). Heart rate (HR) at rest and during exercise is higher at high altitude than at sea level, whereas HRmax is lower. These cardiac adaptations are partially explained by an increased sympathetic stimulation associated with a reduced parasympathetic tone (12). The precise mechanisms of HRmax decline in acute hypoxia are however still to be identified, although several hypothesis have been suggested, such as a direct effect of hypoxia on the electrophysiological properties, an influence of skeletal maximal VO2 or a modulation of the autonomic nervous system (8). Some authors have reported that endurance trained athletes present an increased sensitivity to hypoxia shown by a large reduction in VO2max and an important decrease in arterial saturation. (9,11, 13) A hypoxia test can assess the sensibility of chemoreceptors to the reduction of oxygen by calculating hypoxic ventilatory and cardiac responses, knowing that low sensibility is correlated with poor acclimatization. Two parameters results from the differences in ventilation (and heart rate) divided by the difference in the arterial oxygen saturation between normoxia and hypoxia (18). Objective The hypothesis tested by this study is that parasympathetic reactivation after moderate effort in hypoxic condition can be used as a marker of individual sensibility to hypoxia. Parasympathetic reactivation is a marker of vagal tone that predict endurance capacity and aerobic fitness (2,7). Methods Subjects This study uses data obtained from two groups of athletes participating into two larger studies about adaptation to hypoxia. One group is composed of elite athletes (Swiss ski mountaineering team), the other one of mid-level athletes (ski mountaineering amateurs). The particularity of this target population is that they often train at high altitude, and therefore could show a better response to hypoxia than athleltes of other disciplines. Protocol The athletes performed a submaximal exercise (6min run at 9 km/h, flat) followed by 10 min of seated rest either in an hypoxic chamber (simulated altitude of 3000m) or in normoxic conditions. During the resting phase parasympathetic reactivation was assessed by beat-to-beat HR measurements.A test of tolerance to altitude was also performed. Analysis Parasympathetic reactivation, assessed by the calculation of the root mean square of successive differences in the R-R intervals (RMSSD)(4), is compared to individual responses at altitude, in order to appreciate the correlation between the two phenomena