He did this by yoking anthropometrics, the optical precision of the camera, a refined physiognomic vocabulary, and statistics.īertillon insisted on a standard focal length, even and consistent lightning, and a fixed distance between the camera and the unwilling sitter. (…)īertillong sought to break the professional criminal’s mastery of disguises, false identities, multiple biographies, and alibis. He sought to identify repeat offenders, that is, criminals who were liable to be considered “habitual” or “professional” in their deviant behavior. … Bertillon’s police archive functioned as a complex biographical machine which produced presumably simple and unambiguous results. These two semantic paths are so fundamental to the culture of photographic realism that their very existence is usually ignored. Here the photograph is not regarded as necessarily typical or emblematic of anything, but only as a particular image which has been isolated for purposes of inspection. Another way is to invent (…) a filling system, which allows the operator/researcher/editor to retrieve the individual instance from the huge quantity of images contained within the archive. This is usually achieved by stylistic or interpretive fiat, or by a sampling of the archive’s offerings for a “representative” instance. … one way of “taming” photography is by means of this transformation of the circumstantial and idiosyncratic into the typical and emblematic. The problem of classification was paramount. The early promise of photography had faded in the face of a massive and chaotic archive of images. (…) … the archive could provide a standard physiognomic gauge of the criminal, could assign each criminal body a relative and quantitative position within a larger ensemble. Photography promised more than a wealth of detail it promised to reduce nature to its geometrical essence. The capacity of the archive to reduce all possible sights to a single code of equivalence was grounded in the metrical accuracy of the camera. This image of the archive as an encyclopedic repository of exchangeable images was articulated most profoundly in the late 1850s by the American physician and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes when he compared photographs to paper currency. In both senses, the archive is a vast substitution set, providing for a relation of general equivalence between images. In structural terms, the archive is both an abstract paradigm entity and a concrete institution. The institution of the photographic archive received its most thorough early articulation in precise conjunction with an increasingly professionalized and technological mode of police work and an emerging social science of criminology. … it was only on the basis of mutual comparison, on the basis of the tentative construction of a larger, “universal” archive, that zones of deviance and respectability could be clearly demarcated. … these disciplines were instrumental in constructing the very archive they claimed to interpret. Physiognomy analytically isolated the profile of the head and the various anatomic features of the head and face, assigning a charactereological significance to each element. Both shared the belief that the surface of the body, and especially the face and the head, bore the outward signs of inner character. This paradigm had two tightly entwined branches, physiognomy and phrenology. … by the mid-nineteenth century a single-hermeneutic paradigm had gained widespread prestige. (…) The general all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other embodiment of the unworthy. We can speak then of a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain. … family photography sustained sentimental ties in a nation of migrants. Thus photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look – the typology – and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology. Although photographic documentation of prisioners was not all common until the 1860s, the potential for a new juridical photographic realism was widely recognized in the 1840s.Īt the same time, photographic portraiture began to perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in the same thorough and rigorous fashion.
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