By the last
quarter of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, famine and
starvation had drawn many families away from the country toward industrialized
cities such as Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and London and as a result all
were overrun with crime. The application of photography to bureaucratic and
surveillance technology within an increasingly centralized government body
unsure of how to maintain social order within its own expanding industrialized
cities was, by the 1870s an issue of utmost importance. Increasingly, before
the creation of a centralized police force many localized forces had made
attempts of decreasing the chances of recidivism in the criminal population
through the means of a photographic identification system. However without a
centralized police force nor a combination of bureaucracy and photography these
rarely worked.
The ways
and means in which the state identified and surveyed the criminal body in the
19th century was employed using older ideas of physiognomy and
phrenology and applying it to photography. These images were dissected, cut up
and codified into an order, which could be filed away and brought out for later
scrutiny and identification by a series of trained professionals. In other words,
the body of the criminal was made an archive.
Eliza
Farnham became one of the first to apply photography to the surveillance of
others. In 1846, in the United States, her publication, Rationale of Crime, used engravings made from Dageurreotypes
made by Mathew Brady. Her theories
incorporated ideas of physiognomy and phrenology, made fashionable by
Franz Josef Gall in the early 19th century, which had already set
unsurpassable distinctions between lower and upper classes through “zones of
deviance and respectability” in interpretations of the shape of the skull.
Farnham believed that her studies could have a reformative effect on her
subjects, but by dividing them according to race, ethnicity, gender, class and
age, and by providing commentary upon their skull shapes, she automatically
separates them into the ‘type’ of the surveyed.
In England,
during the 1850’s, Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond became one of the first people to
apply photography to the surveillance of others, albeit with humanistic intentions.
Diamond was the residential superintendent of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum
from 1848 to 1858 and it was there that his experiments with photography and
mental illness began. Photography was generally believed to be the answer for
the need to legitimize the burgeoning pseudo-science of physiognomy championed
by Johan Casper Lavater in the eighteenth century.
Utilising
Frederick Scott Archer’s wet-colodion process, Diamond set about capturing the
female inmates of the Surry County Lunatic Asylum. Diamond was an advocate of
visual imagery as therapy for his patients and was generous in his use of
photography, allowing for the self-reflection required in order for the patient
to view and comment upon their own rehabilitation.
His paper
to the Royal Society in 1856, listed three possible applications of his
photography to the “mental phenomena of insanity”; A.) as a method of treating
the physiognomies of the mentally
ill for study, B.) of treating the mentally ill through the presentation of an
accurate self image, and, most importantly here C.) for documenting the
faces of patients to facilitate identification for later readmission and
treatment.
Adolphe
Quetelet believed that statistical data could identify a composite or average
man through large aggregates of statistical data. In his 1835 treatise ‘Sur
l’homme’, Quetelet relied
upon the central conceptual strategy of social statistics in order to seek
statistical regularities in birth, death and crime. From Quetelet on, social
statisticians become obsessed with anthropometrical researches, focusing both
on the skeletal proportions of the body and the volume and configuration of the
head.
Francis
Galton believed in statistical analysis also but his research was based upon an
unwavering belief in the moral degeneracy of the lower classes. Between 1877
and 1896 Galton produced a series of images that would influence eugenics into
the 20th century. Galton superimposed photographs of varying ethnic
and racial ‘types’ such as Jewish, Irish and African men, women and children on
top of each other, creating a composite image. This resultant, blurry image was
identified by Galton as the definitive description of each ethnicity and would
be used as a basis and an argument for the social betterment through breeding.
Here the body was codified and given order according to a predetermined and
biased set of instructions. Like the archive, photography is only given a
voice by those that wield the power. Sometimes the archive is silent and
sometimes it is loud.
Alphonse
Bertillon was a file clerk in a Paris prefecture in 1893 when he began to
establish what would become known variously as the Bertillon system,
Bertillonage and the Signaletic notice. Up to this point no perfect system had
yet been developed to decrease recidivism in criminals, partly due to no
systematized filing system being agreed apon by differing bureau’s and partly
due to the criminals ability to change thir appearance. Desperate to make a
name for himself in the burgeoning world of criminal identification and to
impress his Anthropometrist father, Bertillon devised a system which combined
both anthropometric data and photography into one taxonomic system.
Upon
entering the prefecture, the suspect would firstly be measured according to set
requirements that Bertillon regarded to be constant in an adult body, then
combined with a shorthand verbal description of distinguishing marks.
For
photography, Bertillon insisted on the maintenance of a standard focal length,
even and consistent lighting and a fixed distance between sitter and camera. He
had the sitter photographed in both profile and frontal views for ease of
identification by other sitters. He organized grids of the male head using
sectional photographs, as the brow largely remains the same throughout life. He
did the same with the ear, which like the fingerprint, rarely changes and is
unique.
Bertllon
sought to reinvent the practice of physiognomy using the cold, hard science of
statistical data. The camera is integrated into a larger ensemble which could
be described as a sophisticated form of the archive in which the central
artifact wielding the most power becomes the filing cabinet itself. Bertillon
devised a classification schema for human beings, which, much like the archive
itself, ordered, separated and taxonomised individual cases into an aggregated
system of identification. Unlike Francis Galton or Eliza Farnham, Bertillon was
not influenced by a biased ethnographic interpretation of racial or ethnic
types. His form of statistical analysis paved the way for the cold, hard
objectivity of 20th century police-work unadorned by class or racial
interpretations.
“What we
have in this standardized image is more than a picture 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.”
- John Tagg, The Burden of Representation.
Bibliography
Dalston, Lorraine and Gallison, Peter, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations 40 (Fall, 1992), pp.
81-128
Popple, Simon ‘Photography, Crime and Social Control’, Early popular Visual Culture, 3:1 (2005),
95-106.
Pearl, Sharrona ‘Through a Mediated Mirror: The Photographic
Physiognomy of Dr Hugh Welch Diamond’, History of Photography, 33:3 (2009), 289-305.
Sekula, Allan, “The Body and the Archive”, October, 39 (Winter, 986),
pp.3-64
Tagg, John, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies
and Histories,
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988
