Cailin Zarate
Chapman University
March 27, 2021
 

        The other is a term used to define those who are outside of a specific group, they can belong to another group entirely or mirror the same group but with opposite traits.  Usually, the other is someone who does not look or act the same way as a majority group. Before I dive into this essay, I would like to note two words that Allan Sekula uses to describe the way a photograph looks at a person; honorific and repressive.[1] These two words are used through the reading to point out the way a photo highlights a person’s capabilities and high traits or their low points and degraded nature. Phrenology, the study of the head as an indication of character and mental abilities, was used in creating the other by subsequently creating an average.[2] This average is the same throughout history: a white, masculine, cis, able-bodied individual. Everyone who falls outside of these characteristics are others. According to Sekula, “Each observation or each group of observations is to be defined, not by its absolute value, but by its deviation from the arithmetic mean.”[3] People were not looked at as individuals with unique characteristics; they were understood by how far from the average they appeared- the further from the mean they appeared the more likely they led an unfit lifestyle or were mentally unfit for society.

         It was believed, using phrenology, that the surface of the body, particularly the head and face “bore the outward signs of inner character.”[4] Thus, photography could be a tool to track and catalog people for many purposes. Phrenology was used to determine if a person was able-minded, capable, and respectable. Hiring businesses used phrenology by viewing pictures of their potential future employees to see if they would be able to do the work sufficiently.[5] “In claiming to provide a means for distinguishing the stigmata of vice from shining marks of virtue, physiognomy and phrenology offered an essential hermeneutic service to a world of fleeting and often anonymous market transactions.”[6] This also birthed the typology of the “criminal,”[7] and introduced photography as a method of identifying and tracking criminals.

         I believe that Victorian scientists trusted photography to be accurate because of their understanding of its ability to mirror real life. Photography was no more than a reflection of reality at the time, so believing the images to be true makes sense. But what the images tell the viewers (such as the Victorian scientist) was subject to personal opinion. I came across a book about photography during the Civil war and the Great Depression, and it mentions the public’s response to viewing the earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln in his thirties (this image was shown in a magazine a few years after his death). Some viewers saw the young man in the picture as handsome, romantic, and destined for greatness; others had trouble believing that it was an actual picture of Lincoln because it lacked his usual melancholy and “aged wisdom.”[8] This goes to show that physiognomy and phrenology were widely accepted methods of understanding; they gave people “scientific reason”[9] to believe what they construed about each other based on a photo. I’ll mention here that it can be easy today to fall for the same thinking; photographs are not as honest as they once were and it is incredibly easy to twist the image to fit a specific narrative. To make matters worse, our society is heavily dependent on quickly viewing single images to receive a whole understanding of an individual (think dating apps and most social media platforms). I did not know the definition of physiognomy or phrenology before writing this essay, but I know that I have made inferences about other people based on their physical features. We do this so often it has become an unconscious act- an implicit bias that is incredibly unhealthy for all.

         Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton both used photography to arrange and classify people. Bertillon’s anthropometric photos were carefully captured images that showed the details of an individual’s physical features. He believed that to identify criminals on the street, the police needed to be aware of their physical characteristics.[10] Sekula wrote, “Scars and other deformations of the flesh were clues, not to any innate propensity for crime, but to the body's physical history: its trades, occupations, calamities.”[11] Bertillon used photography to record evidence of actual crimes committed by actual people. He was meticulous about his documenting, using tools and rulers to measure out exact lengths of the face, neck, and ears. And although his method did take some guidance from Physiognomy, the majority of his work was based on capturing the reality of the situation; it was less about making assumptions or generalizations for who had the capability to become a criminal.[12]

         Galton, on the other hand, used photography to type-cast what an average criminal or lawyer or Jewish or ill person looked like, it is important to note here that these categories of people are all considered others. Galton’s page of portraits Violent Criminals Composite, 1885, was an array of faces, each face was in fact not a single face but a compilation of several different faces exposed on the same plate. He created a profile picture that used limited exposure to record the most similar features over a number of subjects. The images he produced were interesting to look at but are negative profiling of individuals based on no actual statistics or research. Look at today’s society for reference, if the same composite portraits are taken of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, the average congressperson would be an odd morph of men and women of various ethnicities. Back in Galton’s time, the same image would have produced the average of an older white man. This type of profiling prevents women and BIPOC individuals from ever being able to serve in congress because they didn’t fit the average. Unfortunately, this kind of blockage is still evident in many fields today. In terms of crime and documentation, Galton’s method was dangerous. “The individual faces are villainous enough, but they are villainous in different ways, and when they are combined, the individual peculiarities disappear, and the common humanity of a low type is all that is left.”[13] He believed that by piling images on top of each other to create a single face he was identifying the “look of a criminal.”[14] Sekula’s point that the two were attempting to “define and regulate social deviance”[15] is true in that both were trying to create an understanding of who commits a crime and why. One (Bertillon) believed that the path to crime was determined by environmental factors and the fault of urbanization, the other (Galton) felt that people were predisposed to acts of crime due to their physical nature.

         As I’ve mentioned before, the part of our society that dictates social interactions is heavily dependent on the use of photography. We quickly glimpse images of available romantic partners and judge their potential based on their looks, the quality of the photo, and any given characteristics that can be taken from just looking at their faces (or in other words, phrenology). As we continue to grow with our immediate satisfaction mentality, I believe photography will continue to be utilized this way- and it makes sense, it is so easy to quickly view an image of a person and write out their entire back story in that second. Sekula wrote “Photography is not the harbinger of modernity, for the world is already modernizing. Rather, photography is modernity run riot.”[16] I can’t say that I agree with his sentiment, but after reading the text I understand how he developed this understanding. People create the narrative that they want others to receive by only capturing moments where they are happy and seldom sharing images of themselves at low points in their lives. This has created a toxic self-reflection in a lot of people, they wonder why their lives are not as perfect as the person in an image, and this has set some unhealthy expectations of what is considered happy or successful lifestyles.

     It is incredibly interesting to learn about how police tracking and photography are related, and what implications were set then that are still prevalent today. While looking at Galton’s composite portraits, I couldn’t help but notice that in the portrait labeled criminal, there were more dark complexions and ethnic features. “Photography promises an enchanted mastery of nature, but photography also threatens conflagration and anarchy, an incendiary labeling of the existing cultural order.”[17] The social body, Sekula claims, came after the creation of the criminal body, which all consisted of labeling and separating people into boxes of fit and unfit for society.[18] It is without a doubt extremely dishonest to predict a stranger’s capability of committing a crime (or not) based solely on their physical appearance. This typology or racial profiling has been the cause of numerous wrongful deaths and arrests of the BIPOC community; it is dangerous and outdated thinking. We are so much more than our outward appearance. Photography can be a tool to catch the good and bad in everyone, but we need to retrain our eyes to recognize that what we see alone is not the entire truth.