With the invention of photography, came a trust in the truth of the photographic image. This perspective that stemmed from Positivism led to scientific uses of photography that created harmful misconceptions of mental illness and instability, along with a racist lense of marginalized groups. During this time in the nineteenth century, society had just started to contemplate the meaning of race and these beliefs affect how we interpret history, as they crafted a racist lens that influenced the society that we see in modern day.

            In photographer Allan Sekula’s paper, "The Body and the Archive," he argues that “photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look-the typology-and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.”1 This concept of  “The Other” refers to an individual that is perceived by the viewer as different in some underlying way. The Other is displayed in a scientific or analytical manner in order to separate their association with the typical group viewing the photograph. Many examples of this exist, but an undeniable case would be J.E Whitney Studio’s 1862 Carte-de-visite, “Cut Nose.” In this photograph, a Native American is pictured wearing a headdress and below the description reads, “Cut Nose, Who in the Massacre of 1862, in Minnesota, murdered 18 Women and Children and 5 Men.” The man pictured in this image may have no relation to the event that happened and by creating a composite there are many parts of the image that are staged. A headdress is not typically worn by Native Americans all the time, and images like these create harmful stereotypes to discriminated groups.

            These notions that created the concept of “The Other” stemmed from the two influential sciences during the nineteenth century, phrenology and physiognomy. These statistical approaches both aimed to find correlations between physical attributes and character or personality traits. Phrenology focused on the shape and physical features of the skull, while physiognomy studied facial characteristics. Scientists used these ideologies to determine behaviors in humans, such that having certain facial features or concavity of the skull would result in various ranges of morality, physical abilities, and mental capabilities. During this time, photography became useful to scientists as they were able to utilize this new found technology for documenting visual data and identification purposes. Along with the adoption of these uses came the belief that photographic images were fully truthful and were proclaimed as “evidence” of the world around them. 

            These scientific methods of documentation led to harmful and cruel research performed on asylum patients. Two scientists during the nineteenth century that used photographic evidence in their research for internal human characteristics were Duchenne de Boulogne and Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond. Boulogne aimed to map out a guide for the physical traits of human emotion. As shown in his image, “Study of muscles in the face, Fright,” from 1852-1856, his patient is being electrocuted by metal rods in order to contract his muscles and capture his facial expression. This man did not have teeth and his skin was somewhat elastic, which made him Boulogne’s favorite subject to work with, as his reactions were extremely defined. Diamond on the other hand, aimed to find a correlation between physical looks and mental illness. He wanted to explore and discover if there were any physical indications of the insane. Most of the patients he was working with were women, which creates a bias in his research. Sexism was extremely prevalent during this time as women were able to be thrown into asylums against their will if their families wished it upon them. This meant that many of the patients he was dealing with, were not insane, but usually refused to conform to societal normalities. In Diamond’s photographs from 1855, “Patient” and “Seated Woman with Bird,” the viewer is trained to look for the insanity in these two women. The danger of photographic truth comes into play here, as the context of these images are removed from the viewer. In “Seated Woman with Bird,” a dead bird rests in her hands and no context is given to the viewer about why. Maybe this does draw some conclusions of madness, but a possibility exists that Diamond wants the viewer to recognize this person as unstable for the proof of his research on the connections between physical looks and insanity. Both of these women are dressed unusually, but there is context hidden from the viewer. Most of these patients are abandoned by their families and left with little to nothing besides the clothes they received from the hospital. The assumptions made about the women in these photographs led to a large influence in sexism and stereotypes of the lack of mental stability in women. The ultimate issue here is the unwillingness to question the truth of photographs, and the context in which they were taken. Why were scientists set on this notion? This large influence came from modernism, which branched into another way of thinking.

            This new ideology transformed into Positivism during the nineteenth century, which created a large influence on early scientific uses of photography and other records of human physiognomy. This was a popular philosophical approach that presumed that all natural occurrences could be measured and scientifically understood. Additionally, Positivism asserted that the natural world was capable of scientific verification based on logical or mathematical proof and emphasized the prioritization of statistical assumptions. Conclusively, these ideologies led to the belief of photographic objectivity and ultimate truth value. During this time, people were starting to try to understand the concept of race and what visually separated different ethnographic groups. These studies lead to ethnography, which was a descriptive type of anthropology. This created an overwhelming presence of “The Other,” as white male scientists started photographing different races in a devastating way. This produced a vast amount of racism, as these images rendered different groups in demeaning ways. A very well known example of this is the work of Georges Cuvier. The images he had commissioned on the body of Sarah Baartman by Nicolas Huet le Jeune’s, were created in 1815. Baartman was a woman of South African descent who was held as a slave for a traveling circus. She was known for having a large bottom, and she was held in a tent where people could pay in order to see her partially naked body. This treatment of a human being is undoubtedly dehumanizing and tells a horrendous story of the nineteenth century’s history of racism. These images have a lense of “The Other” that exhibits her body as a scientific specimen. This use of ethnography plays a big role in the representation of marginalized groups and harmfully created many over sexualized stereotypes of black women that are still prevalent in modern day.

            Similar to the work of Duchenne de Boulogne and Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond,  this scientific research of ethnography later led to the work of Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Alphonse Bertillon Sekula points out that, “The projects of Bertillon and Galton constitute two methodological poles of the positivist attempts to define and regulate social deviance.”7 Bertillon worked for the Paris police and was responsible for writing down descriptions given of criminals in order to find someone who had commited a crime. While doing so, he found patterns that made him curious if there were any connections between one’s physical attributes and the likeness that they would commit a crime. For instance, he started to study the ears of criminals, pondering if murderers' ears had a certain shape or size. Overall, Bertillon was attempting to discover if there were any statistically significant physical attributes associated with criminal behavior. Although this became a very popular method in criminology, his methods proved to fail, as analyzed by Raymond B. Fosdick in his journal, “The Passing of the Bertillon System of Identification,” when he writes, “But his system of identification is not without its obvious defects. To begin with, it cannot successfully be applied to women or children, as it is based on the measurement of unvarying proportions of the human frame, between adolescence and old age.”8 Although his methods failed to last long, Bertillon’s work was the basis of the discovery of the use of fingerprints in police work. In contrast, Galton used a system of composite portraiture to find an overarching look to an “average” type of person or superiority in breeding. This was researched with many different groups of people, from different occupations to different races. In “Twelve Boston Physicians and Their Composite Portrait”, many physicians surround a rendered photo of what the “average” Boston Physician would have looked like in 1894. This is created by combining these outer photographs together. In his journal, “Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure,” he describes the uses of his work by explaining, “They give us typical pictures of different races of men, if derived from a large number of individuals of those races taken at random. An assurance of the truth of any pictorial deductions is to be looked for in their substantial agreement when different batches of components have been dealt with, this being a perfect test of truth in all statistical conclusions.”10 From Galton’s work, he became known as the Father of Eugenics, as he tried to analyze what groups of people should breed in order to make a “superior human being.” This is the major difference between his work and Bertillon’s. Although these two men had different goals, their work also had similarities. They are related in that they both use physical characteristics to determine stereotypes in morality or physical abilities. Both of their work have had large amounts of negative effects on assumptions made about physical appearances.

            These scientific studies have had a large influence on the practices of photography today. Racism is still extremely prevalent in the United States, as systematic racism continues to reside in the police force. Our criminal justice system has been propagated to search for this “average criminal,” which unfairly focuses on marginalized groups in America. Unavoidable problems become present when the photograph is used to surveil and control people. The largest of these problems is assuming the truth value, which from the many examples that have been shown, creates a bias of the people and groups pictured. When “The Other” is perpetrated into these images, there becomes a separation from the viewer and the human being behind the lens. There is a large amount of dehumanization and objectification that is created through these images. They are the “evidence” that are in history books and in museums. They have no context and only create more of a racist lens on humans that had no say or gave no consent to these scientific studies.

            Throughout history, society has seen many inventions and new technologies arise in which destructive abuses follow. Unfortunately, photography was created during a time when racism, sexism and misunderstandings of mental illnesses were extremely prevalent. Victorian views and Positivism sciences created an overwhelming amount of discrimination and the lense of “The Other.” These views have continued to influence today’s societal views, and the systematic racism that affects billions globally and millions in our own twenty first century America.