From conception, the photographic process has consisted of the convergence of both science and art. Having the literal meaning of “drawing with light,” as translated from the Greek words photo and graph, it is the creation of imagery via manipulation by technology. Its dually artistic and scientific identity has persisted and grown over time. The photographic device has evolved from the frames and chemicals of the camera obscura, daguerreotype, and calotype, to those of the Polaroid, point-and-shoots, webcams, and DSLRs; photos have become more popular and accessible, capturing more of the living and the dead and, through different techniques in composition, design, and framing, expressing not only whether or not the subjects are alive, but their liveliness and ways of living.

Because of photography’s ability to “capture” moments in time, the science of photography also lies in its utility for keeping record and providing data, or, as Allan Sekula puts it, establishing an “Archive” for society to refer to in perceiving and distinguishing its members.1  Contributions to said Archive are in the form of mugshots and taxonomic, physiognomic, and phrenologic portraits and, as proposed in the new age of the Digital Archive, surveillance footage, more photo ID, and even face scans and fingerprints.2 However, the attempt to record and classify individuals, their behaviors, and their social value on the basis of photography is not holistic and fails to be properly inclusive of those archived, criminalizing subjects not necessarily by their criminal actions, but by what has been photographed of them and those physically similar to them. In past as well as modern times, photography’s role in criminology and social pathology has taken a position that disregards the medium as an art and heavily relies on its scientific characteristics in order to factualize ostracizing beliefs into science themselves, manifesting and deepening the social concept of the belittled, marginalized Other.

The trust in photographic images for accuracy and truth for scientists, since the Victorian era, stems from the juxtaposition of truth that photographs seemed to offer in comparison to all other forms of evidence available. With photographs, presentation superseded memory. The camera, an external object, could simply capture scenes for what they were, to the extent of the scope of the device itself. Scientists then seemed to have evidence that was indexical, “a new legalistic truth” and “mute testimony” that would, according to photography pioneer Henry Fox Talbot, “[unmask] the disguises, the alibis, the excuses and multiple biographies of those who [found] or [placed] themselves on the wrong side of the law.”3 Not only were they given access to descriptions of people, things, and places, but they were able to study still, light-captured depictions of them. This indexicality of photography was a solution to the lapses in understanding that come from purely textual inventory, exhibiting the Positivist essence of the idea that “seeing” can lead to reason to “believing.”

Positivism heavily influenced the usage of photography, the newly introduced medium supplying visual data for scientists to pick apart and analyze for repetition in their studied depictions, repetition that could form trends, algorithms, mathematical and scientific reasons that linked subjects together or separated one group of subjects from another. For photography to be used in physiognomy and phrenology, the inherently “comparative” disciplines of the outer characteristics of the face and skull, is for it to be a tool to not only study, but to pick apart and sort “the entire range of human diversity” the disciplines aim to encompass. For Positivists, this “range” was composed of individuals that fit into types of people “along a loose set of ‘moral, intellectual, and animal’ continua,” whose physical features could reflect, in photographs, whether they were good people of virtue or weak, immoral idiots.4

An early example of photography for Positivism-motivated science is in Eliza Farnham’s new 1846 edition of Marmaduke Sampson’s Rationale of Crime, in which Farnham commissioned Mathew Brady to photograph a series of portraits of prisoners who had exhibited criminal behavior and, thus, as concluded in the book, were of “moral insanity” that called for “therapeutic modification or enhancements.”5 The portraits of adult prisoners included both males and females, who were identified as black, Irish, German, Jewish, and half Native American in the book, but only three out of ten portraits were of white, Anglo-Saxon men, whose identities were not noted. With a mirror for the middle-class reader at the end of the book, congratulating their lack of criminal behavior and moral insanity, Farnham suggests here that those who resemble the Victorian middle-class reader, notably, educated Anglo-Saxon men, are of greater virtue and morally sane, in comparison to others, men and women of color and of Irish, German, and Jewish descent. There is even the proposed distinction between the “criminal genius,” the criminal who must be redeemable, as he physically resembles the bourgeois group, and the criminal who does not look the part of a white bourgeois member.6 Inversely, for the book’s portraits of child inmates, “Farnham avoided stigmatizing them” by “marking [the] children less in racial and ethnic terms,”7 a tactic that solidifies the condemning effect of marking individuals’ descents as factors to their imprisonment, as well as displays the opposite consideration that comes with the omittance of such categorization. Overall, Rationale of Crime puts forth the conception, with the visual aid of photographs, that looking and being of a different descent than that of the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois makes one immoral, unstable, and ill, with only hope one may be redeemed or renewed.

From this instance, the concept of the Other is developed as the non-middle-class, Anglo-Saxon male and, rather, poor males and females of color and enslaved, oppressed backgrounds, as is seen in Rationale of Crime. The Other is the individual that is not well-accepted and regarded. The Other is the criminal who is not redeemable by their genius. Later physiognomic projects by Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton in identifying the criminal further defined the concept of the Other, concentrating on Adolphe Quetelet’s notion of l’homme moyen, “the average man.”8 While the two have different methods and philosophies, the works of both contributed to a more general, standardized “ideal, not only of social health, but of social stability and beauty” of all things good and beautiful, that man had ought to be to be deemed worthy, rather than deemed Other.9


In analyzing the figures of criminals with photographic images, Bertillon’s approach was much more individualistic, while Galton aimed to further generalize and seek answers that lied in subjects’ heritage. Bertillon attempted to “define social deviance,”10 as Sekula states, by surveying the criminal for identifying measurements, physical features, and marks that may explain their behavior, including the crime they commit. Visible marks on the criminal’s face, for example, may have provided context into their occupation, lifestyle, or crime itself, and knowledge of their physique may have clued authority into what crimes they were physically capable of doing. Thus, for Bertillon’s anthropometric photos, clarity and definition were crucial to view, comprehend, and classify the criminal as best as possible, although error in classification was very much possible. Contrastingly, Galton’s composite portraits are deliberately less sharp, being the product of many layers of underexposed portraits imposed on top of one another. This method of overlapping underexposed portraits revealed what Galton believed to be “pictorial statistics,” showing blurry “averages” of features and how different they were from those of the central type, whether that type be the benchmark for likeness in a family, the Jewish race, royal officers, or criminals.11 In generating soft images of types of people, such as the poor, non-Anglo-Saxon criminals, Galton produced images in the Archive of physical stereotypes for society to either glorify or condemn, positing distinct shapes and looks to both l’homme moyen and the non-average Other for everyone to recognize. While Bertillon sought to show what social deviance looked like and potential reasons behind it, Galton depicted what social deviance could look like, criminalizing certain appearances despite whether or not acts of crime had even occurred, redefining that the Other is ostracized because of appearance and descent, rather than behavior.

Galton’s Positivist, generalizing, photographic method for criminology perpetuated ideas of eugenics and white Anglo-Saxon supremacy in its definition of the Other as the non-beautiful criminal and their detailing of the Other’s “criminal” features, issues that still persist in modern society. In a digital, technologically advanced age with more camera surveillance, recording, photography, and media coverage than ever, the risk of an individual being criminalized for their appearance is far from gone. 

Sekula’s archive is now a Digital Archive, an actual database for police and authority to file and backlog an even greater amount of photos, as well as photographs of fingerprints and DNA samples from any scenes, to be able to be kept forever. The danger in this Digital Archive, according to Jonathan Finn, is that these kept digital photos and samples position every individual to be at risk of being criminalized. Like with Galton’s approach, “Criminality is less a function of an actual criminal event.”12 Photographic surveillance and control now views and treats everyone as a potential criminal, having their information preloaded into the system. The issue here is that past logs into the Digital Archive may later wrongfully convict individuals on the mere basis of their previously recorded physio and biological identities. When scanned and photographed at border crossings and airports, an individual from a country deemed as a “national threat” with a history of petty crime may have a “hit” or match in the database and can be “reidentified [...] as a potential threat to national security.” Anyone brought into the archive is subject to the risk of reidentification, greater criminalization, and ostracization in the future because while their presence in the archive is “immutable,” their “identity, rights, and freedoms as an innocent citizen, petty thief, terrorist national threat, or otherwise changes with the nature of the investigation and the assembly and visualization of data.”13 All power and control lies within those who operate the camera and its files.

Additionally, like how photographic images could not perfectly reveal the truth, as hoped for in the Victorian era, photographic surveillance now, despite its advancements, is still faulty. Humans, even when presented with the “indexical” truth that is photographs, are unable to successfully match unfamiliar faces if presented evidence from varying cameras, even if there is no other deliberate form of deception to skew their recognition.14 There is even misplaced confidence in photo-identification, as we struggle to differentiate similar images of different people and, conversely, recognize the same faces that have aged over time.15 This is where gathering many photos of the same subject and averaging them,16 tangential to Galton’s method, may be useful. For modern face recognition based on average images, however, the purpose is to optimize recognition, especially for machines, rather than social distinction and generalization.

Photography has proven throughout the eras its usefulness in archiving people, history, crime, celebration, and pathology. It is a refined art and science, but by no means is the medium perfect. To rely on photographic mediums solely, in the Positivist past and in the present, is dangerous, both socially, in the division of society into those of “the average man” and those of the Other, and technically, with gaps in technology and context yet to be filled that photographic surveillance and control have yet to be able to reach with unquestionable accuracy. As the medium continues to develop, and society along with it, there is hope that its indexical nature is used to further tolerance, recognition, and understanding instead, as the Archive expands.