The Body and The Archive
Photography, the action of capturing light into permanent images, is commonly perceived a positive practice. Photos allow glimpses of far off-locations and cultures, and even provide windows through time. Modern culture is so dependent on photography that it is hard to imagine a time without a constant stream of images at our fingertips. There is no doubt that photography has played a major role in cultural exchange and communication between peoples. At first glance, photography is the realization of the enlightenment dream of a universal language.[1] A deeper look, however, reveals that photography has been a tool of exploitation and manipulation, ultimately being as hurtful to society as it has been helpful.
From the time scientists discovered how to fix images on paper, photography was used to categorize and divide. Photography strengthened visual identification of the Other, thus delimiting their already disadvantaged societal role. The term “the Other” represents all of the individuals who were different from the viewer. In Western photography, this includes people of color and different ethnicities and people with mental illnesses and chronic diseases. However, anyone could be perceived as Other if they varied from the audience in any way. Thus, photography became a tool of separation, dividing people into distinct groups based on their physical characteristics. One division that was frequently documented in photographs was between the owner and the owned. Even before the photographic process was fully refined, there was an understanding that objects’ legal status could be determined by visual documentation of ownership. In 1844, inventor of the calotype William Henry Fox Talbot took pictures of his chinaware as proof of ownership. Talbot’s Articles of China, plate III from The Pencil of Nature, (1844) became the precedent to photographs of owned objects.[2]
In the mid-nineteenth century, this included the ownership of other human beings. In a 1850 series of daguerreotypes taken by J.T Zealy and commissioned by Louis Agassiz depicted enslaved men and women stripped of their clothing and photographed entirely exposed, as though displayed for sale on the auction block. The photographs were taken with the intent of providing scientific evidence of polygenesis, though the only thing physically differentiating the enslaved individuals from their captors is the amount of pigment in their skin and the physical torment their bodies have endured.[3] In their eyes, one can see the physical and emotional toll of losing ownership over one’s body. These images acted as “scientific” justification of racist social and legal structures, particularly in the American South.[4] Thus, photography quickly became a tool of categorization in which people, places, and things are reduced to visual characteristics.
Photography rose to prominence in the 1840s in a fractured America driven to violence by racism, pride, and ignorance.[5] Early photographic practice in the United States is closely tied to documentation of slave ownership. Due to the South’s determination to maintain their slave-based economy even after the civil war, photography was as a way to control black bodies and disenfranchise newly freed African Americans. Along with mass incarceration of black individuals through Jim Crow laws came an influx of prisoner photographs and popularization of the dangerous black man stereotype. Photos of lynchings were widely distributed, dehumanizing those who had been murdered and normalizing extreme violence against black people.[6] The South also prided itself on traditional family values and utilized photography as visual proof of lineage and family history.[7] Unfortunately, this practice also has a racist backstory, given that photographers “actively promoted familial self-surveillance for hereditarian purposes,” to prove the racial purity of a family bloodline.[8]
Sir Francis Galton, an English photographer and founder of eugenics (racism justified via pseudoscience), believed that the Other could be identified by physical characteristics.[9] With the goal of determining common criminal traits, Galton created composite photographs of criminal faces. He also compiled photos of the chronically ill and of different races in order to determine the “average” features of these groups. His observations of Jewish men, women, and children had particularly damaging effects on European society, eventually influencing the Nazi practice of identifying and exterminating Jewish people.[10] The public accepted Galton’s composites as scientific fact because of their faith in the camera as an objective tool, not considering Galton’s bias, the scientific inaccuracies of his data collection, and camera tricks such as overexposure. Though Galton's findings were inconclusive and vague, since they had absolutely no actual scientific foundation, he published his work in his 1869 book Hereditary Genius.[11] The book stressed the idea of nature over nurture, asserting that people’s biology and physicality determined their personality rather than their upbringing and environment.[12] This thinking fueled racist ideologies and legal practices such as segregation and incarceration. In France, photographers pursued identifying the physical qualities of repeat criminal offenders for the purpose of deporting these individuals to the penal colonies. Photographs of criminals paralleled “systematic efforts to regulate the growing urban presence of the ‘dangerous classes.’”[13] These dangerous classes consisted of the Other: the mentally ill, people of color, those without houses, etc. Thus, photography has roots in the racist and discriminatory desire to separate the Other from the rest of “normal” society. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso believed criminals to be a primitive human type, using photographs of epileptics and tattooed criminals as evidence of their inferiority.[14] Because criminals were seen as subhuman and a plethora of racist laws were in place specifically to incarcerate people of color, photographs of prisoners helped fuel the racist stereotype of the criminal black man.[15]
Like Galton and Lombroso, French police officer Alphonse Bertillon was interested documenting criminals through photography. Bertillon also used photography in criminal investigations, though he often tampered with images by painting over elements and cropping photographs to intensify their sensationalism.[16] In the early days of photography, people trusted the camera as an exact representation of reality. Nowadays, altering photographs is easier than ever and the truth can be obscured with a few minutes on Photoshop. Early photographic methods of social control set the foundations for modern surveillance in place today. Hidden cameras, police dash cams, and security cameras shape the public’s perception of events and play a major role in the justice system. While we would like to believe that photography serves as a way to discover the truth in criminal investigations, more often than not, the truth can easily be warped and edited. Police body camera footage, supposedly a safeguard against police brutality, is often lost or trimmed short.
Photos and videos of black bodies abused by the police circulate on news cycles and social media sites, further normalizing inhumane treatment of people of color. While these photos generate plenty of outrage, they also cause psychological harm without improving the chances of a conviction.[17] George Floyd’s death in 2020 led to a wave of white people sharing a violent video of a man’s death in the name of “raising awareness” without enacting any real change. It is important to remind modern society of the long history of violence endured by black people in America, reliving this traumatic history every time a new video of racism is shared can be mentally exhausting for the black community.[18]
[1] Denise Johnson, "Imaging Freedom" (The Slide Projector, California, March 10).
[2] Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October 39 (1986): 5. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/778312.
[3] Henninger, Katherine. “History, Photography, and Race in the South: From the Civil War to Now.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/audio-video/mann-symposium.html.
[4] Henninger, Katherine. “History, Photography, and Race in the South: From the Civil War to Now.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/audio-video/mann-symposium.html.
[5] Henninger, Katherine. “History, Photography, and Race in the South: From the Civil War to Now.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/audio-video/mann-symposium.html.
[6] Cothren, Claire Renae. THE EVOLVING SOUTHERN GOTHIC: TRADITIONS OF RACIAL, GENDER, AND SEXUAL HORROR IN THE IMAGINED AMERICAN SOUTH. Aug. 2015, oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/155404/COTHREN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1. Pg 26
[7] Henninger, Katherine. “History, Photography, and Race in the South: From the Civil War to Now.” National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/audio-video/mann-symposium.html.
[8] Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October 39 (1986): 54. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/778312.
[9] Galton, Francis. "Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure." The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 8 (1879): 132-44. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/2841021.
[10] Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October 39 (1986): 3-64. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/778312.
[11] Galton, Francis. “Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences.” London: Macmillan, 1869.
[12] Galton, Francis. “Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences.” London: Macmillan, 1869.
[13] Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October 39 (1986): 40. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/778312.
[14] Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October 39 (1986): 37. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/778312.
[15] Phillips, Siobhan. “Is Photography a Method of Social Control?” Getty Iris, 2 Nov. 2020, blogs.getty.edu/iris/is-photography-a-method-of-social-control/.
[16] Phillips, Siobhan. “Is Photography a Method of Social Control?” Getty Iris, 2 Nov. 2020, blogs.getty.edu/iris/is-photography-a-method-of-social-control/.
[17] Morrison, Sara. “Questions to Ask Yourself before Sharing Images of Police Brutality.” Vox, Vox, 11 June 2020, www.vox.com/recode/2020/6/11/21281028/before-sharing-images-police-brutality-protest-george-floyd-ahmaud-arbery-facebook-instagram-twitter.
[18] Morrison, Sara. “Questions to Ask Yourself before Sharing Images of Police Brutality.” Vox, Vox, 11 June 2020, www.vox.com/recode/2020/6/11/21281028/before-sharing-images-police-brutality-protest-george-floyd-ahmaud-arbery-facebook-instagram-twitter.