The Body and the Archive
However, the invention of photography promised, for many reasons it seemed, to bring much greater equality in the production of imagery to the world. For one, because of the materials used in production, as well as the short time it would use to create imagery, photography would most likely be much cheaper to produce than say a painting and require much less practice training for the creator. This meant that more and more people would be able to create images of whatever they wanted, and that the means of production weren’t just in the hands of those at the top of society. It also promised a sort of unfiltered window into reality, as the production of an image, it seemed, was without human interference. That is to say that images produced from photography were real and unedited, whereas a painting, no matter how realistic, carried some style and influence from the artist who was producing it. The promise of photography then was that anyone could create an image of anything for a very low cost, meaning that the truths of the world could be shared freely between people regardless of social status or wealth.
Unfortunately, for the most part, photography was led down many other paths, and this hopeful promise of photography was not fully achieved. While, for the most part, photography did create the opportunity for anyone to create imagery, the ideas of photography showing only the truth were a lot more complicated than originally imagined. As Alan Sekula put it in his 1986 article The Body and the Archive, photography presents, “a double system: a system of representation capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively.”[1] While it was remained true that a camera would create an exact image of whatever was in front of it, this did not necessarily mean that what was in front of it had been untampered with, and also that the context which it was presented in was free of human interference. In other words, although all images at the time represented real things, these things themselves were not necessarily real, and the context which they were displayed in, or the understandings or explanations given to them, could still be tampered with or reimagined, in the same way a painter would inflict their style on a painting.
One of the earliest and best examples of this unseen effect of photography is in the carte-de-visites produced through the nineteenth century. Carte-de-visites were a similar size to a postcard and were often given or traded with friends and family. While individuals could go out and get carte-de-visites made of themselves to send around, prints were also made of things of interest which people could also collect. These included celebrities, animals, objects, even places, each of which often accompanied by a name or description to help the viewer understand what was being represented. In many ways, in an era where people knew little about the world outside their own communities, these carte-de-visites became peoples windows to seeing the whole world. However, what was depicted was not always accurate to reality, and in many cases these images were only reflections of the thoughts that people already held.
For instance, many carte-de-visites were produced in the United States of Native American peoples. These images, while no doubt a reflection of what was in front of the camera lens, did not tell the truth of what they really were. Many of the Native Americans photographed were dressed or positioned by the photographers to enhance their differing features to the white viewers of the carte-de-visites. Many of them were dressed in outfits they would not normally wear, often stereotyped feathered or fur outfits. These photos were incredibly staged, shown by the fact that they are taken in front of common studio backdrops. Along with these set up images, the carte-de-visites were printed with names and descriptions which also played into a preconceived image of what a Native American would be: names spelt out phonetically in English, poor or simply false translations of the name, and descriptions of crimes the person had committed. These were meant to describe and define what was being photographed scientifically, horribly similar to how a plaque next to an enclosure at a zoo would read.
During this period of history, those living in the colonial west had come to understand the world through positivism. Positivism dictated that all things could be known through empirical knowledge, they could be seen or heard or felt, and that rules that worked in one field of science could be used to draw conclusions in all other places. Simply, ”Methodological positivism refers to a concept of knowledge, a concept of social reality, and a concept of science.”[2] People understood these carte-de-visites not only as scientific images of people, but also inferred a social meaning from them. Because these people were presented as criminals or as primitive, those viewing them through the lens of positivism took away a scientific meaning to them that also prescribed meaning onto their social lives. Because these people believed that the images were completely accurate, as photographs had been described, and because they showed Native Americans in a more “primitive” state of being, then colonialists a believed that this was scientific evidence of a white superiority.
But this formula wasn’t just used against Native Americans. Carte-de-visites were produced of enslaved Africans in the United States as well as of Africans living in Africa. In both cases, photographs continued to be staged, deepening the already held stereotypes and beliefs held against these peoples. Because photography was still viewed to many as a scientific process and not an artistic one, this engrained these prejudices as scientific, rooting them into the colonialist’s minds. With this too came the study of physiognomy, which explained that the characteristics of people’s faces, the proportions, wrinkles, shapes, etc. could predict a person’s personality traits. Photographers began looking at extensively at photos of criminals or people with mental disabilities to look for patterns which would be able to define these traits. Two men who began research on this were Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, neither one a scientist nor photographer. Both men believed that, by photographing a wide selection of criminals, a certain facial type could be disseminated and used to identify criminals. This was the beginning of the use of what today would be considered the mugshot. Bertillon worked to capture photos of individual criminals and describe and categorize them, creating huge amounts of data similar to the datasets we now use in computers. Galton, on the other hand, used multiple exposures on the same negative to create a composition of multiple faces, creating what would a generalized “criminal face”.
What both men were really doing, however, were attempting to reinforce the ideas that your physical characteristics were descriptive of your mental characteristics. In the world of colonialism, this theoretical all-knowing was believed possible, and was one of the bases for slavery and the intense racism which followed. Similar to how both men believed they could find a criminal simply from their outward appearance, so could one tell a lot about a nonwhite person simply for their appearance. Today, this assumption on appearance persists, although for many it is not necessarily intentional. While Galton and Bertillon sought to find patterns in the faces of criminals, people today are presented with these patterns without their knowledge, reinforcing prejudices or creating them, almost creating a cyclical effect. Because of the continued racism in American society, people with African heritage are criminalized and incarcerated at a much higher rate. This leads to many Americans seeing images of police photographs of African Americans, which creates in the mind of society a false assumption that this is the common image of a criminal. This continues the assumptions of racists and continues a very harsh cycle which in many ways can be traced back to Galton and Bertillon. Therefore, it is immensely important to know the power of photography, and that the simple logic of positivism is not only deeply flawed, but also in many ways illogical.
