There are bodies and spaces. The bodies – workers,
vagrants, criminals, patients, the insane, the poor, the colonized races – are
taken one by one: isolated in a shallow, contained space; turned full-face and
subjected to an unreturnable gaze; illuminated, focused, measured, numbered and
named; forced to yield to the minutest scrutiny of gestures and features. Each
device is the trace of a wordless power, replicated in countless images,
whenever the photographer prepares an exposure, in police cell, prison,
mission house, hospital, asylum, or school. The spaces, too – uncharted
territories, frontier lands, urban ghettos, working class slums, scenes of
crime – are confronted with the
same frontality and easured against an ideal space: a clear space, a healthy
space, a space of unobstructed lines of sight, open to vision and supervision;a
desirable space in which bodies will be changed into disease free, orderly,
docile and disciplined subjects; a space, in Foucoult’s sense, of a new
strategy of power knowledge. For this is what is at stake in missionary
explorations, in urban clearance, sanitary reform and health supervision, in
constant, regularised policing – and in the photography which furnished them
from the start with so central a technique.
What we have in this standardized image is more than a
pictire of a supposed criminal. It is a portrait of the product of the
disciplinary method: the body made object; divided and studied; enclosed in a
cellular structure of space whose architecture is the file-index; made docile
and forced to yield up its truth; separated and individuated; subjected and
made subject. When accumulated, such images amount to a new representation of
society.
From; Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988
Yes! I now want to read this book -- thank you. I believe 'FindMyPast.co.uk' (I think that's the correct name) has just put exclusive scans of just these sort of 'mugshots' online but unfortunately I don't have a subscription so can't see them. Very tempting, though.
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