Portrait and scan

This article is an ethnography of color and black‐and‐white in medical images of a particular kind—prenatal ultrasound—in a particular place—Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is also a meditation on histories and theorizations of color. It moves from the discourse and practice of pregnant women, family members, and doctors about color and black‐and‐white, to political and intellectual histories of color in Cambodia and in anthropology, to Buddhist ontologies of pregnancy and life. Across this diverse terrain, the notion of the image‐affect conveys how images stimulate affective responses in viewers and how images affect their referents. A method of listening to and for image‐affects helps us to understand how people relate to the elemental instability of images and the instability of beings to which images refer and with which they become.