By Charlie Hoberman

The early uses of photography brought a new narrative for a class of people heavily underrepresented in bourgeois culture during the early 1800s. The concept of “The Other” comes from the sheer nature of what photography brought about in the Victorian era: a new found access into what would honor yet repress a class of people never depicted before in portraiture. No longer was portraiture a matter of higher class; something of an event. Instead, the photographic portrait allowed for access and accuracy into the bourgeois self. But, the 1840’s was a time when photography was widely thought of as able to regulate the then growing lower class of people. “The photographic portrait in particular was welcomed as a socially ameliorative as well as a socially repressive instrument”.[1] Sekula mentions the repressive nature of photography brought up by the archive, which created a new system to log illness and mental instability. “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 embodiments of the unworthy”.[2] Through this, the idea of positivism had a heavy influence on the early scientific use and trust in the accuracy of the photograph. 
            The photographic standard of the mid-nineteenth century had two parts, physiognomy and phrenology, which showed the integrity of the person being photographed through facial features and the shape of the face. This belief the facial expressions portrayed in the photo manifest from the outward appearance to the inner character, led to the emergence of studying the mind through photography. In the late 1770s, Johann Caspar Lavater stated, “physiognomy analytically isolated the profile of the head and the various anatomic features of the head and the face, assigning a characterological significance” [3] to each part of the face. The ideas of these features coming together in a photograph to represent the whole of a person, created a backbone for the truth in the image. But, it is the technological and professional mode of the camera and the photograph which created a new institutionalized aspect that led Victorian scientists to trust the accuracy and truthfulness of the photograph. “For nineteenth century positivists, photography doubly fulfilled the Enlightenment dream of a universal language: the universal mimetic language of the camera yielded up a higher, more cerebral truth, a truth that could be uttered in the universal abstract language of mathematics”.[4]
            As the photograph developed a serious accuracy and trust during the Victorian era, photography became evidence and statistics. This movement of the 1880’s was led in two comparable yet contrasting ways by Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton. Francis Galton was a statistician and sociologist who founded the study of eugenics.  Alphonse Bertillon was a french police officer who invented the first effective modern system of criminal identification.  His photos combined “photographic portraiture, anthropometric description, and highly standardized and abbreviated written notes on a single card”.[5] He would then use an easy to understand and statistically based filing system to record a collection of criminals. Francis Galton invented a differing method that focuses on composite portraiture. While using portrait photographs of various groups, Galton was determined to search for the biologically deemed “criminal type” by compositing all the photographs into one.  “Although Galton used the photographic camera for precisely this reason-for objectivity of mechanical reproduction it afforded-he also interfered with the image produced, manipulating this to produce the image of an exemplar or ideal type, rather than an individual subject”.[6] Here, he was trying to find the evidence of the “essence of crime”.[7]  By compiling a multitude of different aspects of different faces into one portrait, he was able to focus on the hereditary aspects of the composites of the faces. His photos really define the physiognomic feature of his work. While Bertillon photographed logged criminals, creating an intense filing system, Galton discovered the photographic impression of what a criminal would be. “Where Bertillon was a compulsive systematizer, Galton was a compulsive quantifier. While Bertillon was concerned primarily with the triumph of social order over social disorder, Galton was concerned primarily with the triumph of established ran over the forces of social leveling and decline”.[8]  Both men, however, were establishing the notion of a criminal. Each of their projects was “grounded in the emergence and codification of social statistics in the 1830s and 1840s”. [9]
But Sekula makes an interesting point: “The projects of Bertillon and Galton constitute two methodological poles of the positivist attempts to define and regulate social deviance”.[10] Here, Sekula notes the implications of both gentleman’s work. While it is a more clear exploitation of the product of manipulation through the eyes of Galton’s manufactured nature of his composites, Bertillon also brought up implications. “Both men were committed to technologies of demographic regulation”.[11] Bertillon looked at the individual in order to separate a kind of criminal that would commit a high quality of crime over and over again, extracting the person from society. His “policing through photography” work seems to go unnoticed as an implication to the system due to the nature of it.  “Galton’s composite portraits, on the other hand, would leave little trace in the scientific cultures of his time”.[12] His work is now more attached to optical curiosity, somewhat of a haunting nature with his composites rather than an accurate representation of a biological narrative of a group. 
The concept of photography constituting a “universal language” and having the visual culture represented heavily in society today, it’s no wonder that the same implications Bertillon and Galton’s work still proceed. While artists such as August Sanders went along with the idea of archival, Stieglitz and Edward Weston “resisted through modernist reworkings of the anti positivism and antirationalism of the Photo Secession”.[13] Though the modernization of photography, there still contains the same issues Bertillon and Galton possessed in their work. Allan Sekula notes in his article, “The Traffic in Photographs”,  photography is “no more a ‘reflection’ of capitalist society than a particular photograph is a ‘reflection’ of its referential object”.[14] This is clear in photographer Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man”, an album of hundreds of photos representing the birth to life to death from multiple countries by 273 photographers in separate exhibits across the MoMA. “Here, yet again, are the twin ghosts that haunt the practice of photography: the voice of a reifying technocratic objectivism and the redemptive voice of a liberal subjectivism”.[15] Streichen’s exhibit is a prime example of cultural colonialism and the images of the idea of life, death and work being subjected to a handful of images to represent a whole provides the same issues Bertillon and Galton issued with their use of portraiture.
 While both Bertillon and Galton hold serious controversy in the implications of their      work, their influence still impacts photography. Their surveillance and control over the image of the criminal and the generalization of a lower class group of people is integral in problems of political and social issues. These repressive aspects “improved the chances of identification, to a certain extent, and it was a form of symbolic apprehension of a person”.[16] For instance, when a wanted person is published in a newspaper, “the evasion by this very person of the institutions of discipline and control” [17] take over the criminal's identity. Bertillon and Galton still live on in the way photography is used to surveil today. Bertillon “survives in the operations of the national security state, in the condition of intensive and extensive surveillance that characterizes both everyday life and the geopolitical sphere”.[18] But Galton’s ideas find themselves in a very dangerous authority of a biologically determined idea “increased [by the] hegemony of the political Right in the Western democracies”.[19] Galton was a known promoter of self-surveillance through photography in families in order to contribute to his eugenic research. The problem with associating photography, with a sense of control and surveillance, is that it becomes the key narrative of the photo. It is Bertillon and Galton that best brought out this nature, having that be really the only reason why they continued using portraits in their archival and eugenic areas.