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Abstract
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.

In this article, the author juxtaposes writing and conversation about care for, with, and in spite of technology in Cambodia. The scene is medical care, and the actors are radiologists, engineers, cadres, and X-ray machines. A radiologist is forced to repair an X-ray machine for doctors of the revolution; the pressure and constraints are almost unreal, yet his skill in repair affirms his humanity and the specialized knowledge and creativity required for problem solving. An engineer teaches repair as he fixes an old X-ray machine. He finds words and necessary tools are missing in Phnom Penh, a familiar story of lack, yet repair is material practice that enables improvisation in spite of linguistic and epistemic challenges. A radiologist, the same one from before, in the twilight of his life, questions the dominance of technologies within medical care and the deskilling of doctors. Juxtaposing these stories bolsters attention for the mundane and creative work of keeping things going in a "broken world," in line with the ways that care and repair are mobilized in STS. It also shows how the radical potential of "broken world thinking" is circumscribed when a broken world is the one from which people are struggling to distance themselves. What we are left with are multiple, overlapping, fraught stories of modernity in which need, choice, and pleasure of repair all have a place.

The essay juxtaposes three moments of medical infrastructure and technology aid in Phnom Penh, Cambodia: 1960, 2010, and 2005. The operative terms of these moments are relationship terms: 'friendship', 'partnership', and 'orphan'. The 1960 gift of a hospital, equipment, and training made a friend, and reciprocity involved political alignment at the level of the nation-state. The 2010 gift of equipment and training made a partner, and reciprocity involved brand alignment spread across diverse government ministries, public hospitals, private universities, and private businesses. Focusing on the materiality of technology and infrastructure gifts brings us to the orphan. The orphan is a gift that turns toxic. Its toxicity is health-threatening if there is no infrastructure to secure it. The elaborate partnerships required to identify and secure orphan sources of radiation show how gifts of medical technology and infrastructure exist beyond their immediate utility to humans. What technology of partnership will the medical physicist of 2050 unearth, and what ethic of relationality will come to care for, repair, and secure it?