Trinity Hall Essay 2
‘The Body and the Archive’ was a fascinating read. It was complex and gave the reader a lot of good information. ‘The Body and the Archive’ explores many different ideas in one piece of writing. Allan Sekula wrote many interesting papers with a lot of good information during his time. There are even some papers that help explain topics that are discussed in this piece of work. His writings are connected because he focused on a specific field that all intertwines in some way. Allan Sekula was a photographer, and he spent a lot of his time teaching until his death in 2013.
The ‘other’ is not something that should have happened, but life was very different then, and people believed they had the right to own and have control of certain people. The ‘other’ is a topic that referred to the person that is not what everyone else is. The ‘other’ is a type of person different from everyone else or what is perceived as expected and singled out because of it. They are human beings just like us, but the people who are considered ‘the other’ were seen as different because of the period. They were photographed and either seen as images for enjoyment. On the other hand, this was an easy way to identify them for buying in the case that ‘the other’ tended to be slaves. Therefore, these images would help the buyers see what they will be receiving if they end up buying the slave. In the case of enjoyment, they were usually miss treated for being different. The ‘other’ in this case were not seen as human beings, which was why they tended to be mistreated. The ‘other’ evolved over time from being slaves to people with mental illnesses.
There was an experiment that occurred where a man wanted to see how mentally ill people looked. The man doing the experiment wanted to see how mentally ill people looked and if you could tell they had mental illness just by the pictures. However, during this time, most people that were in mental institutions were women. During this time, men were able to put their wives into mental institutions for many reasons. In this society, men were dominant and could send their wives for any number of reasons that they saw fit. Through this experiment, this is how ‘the other’ revolved from pictures of slaves and people who looked different for enjoyment to mentally ill people. This is how it evolved, but this experiment wasn’t the most accurate because most of ‘the other’ in these pictures were mostly women. This study was not evenly distributed like the previous ‘others’ because most of these were women.
Positivism had a very positive effect on many things, especially human physiognomy. Physiognomy is a person’s facial features that help determine different similar aspects based on origin and race. Physiognomy was a fundamental form of human science.[1]
Positivism was greatly efficient and was implemented frequently, with physiognomy. Physiognomy was starting to be used by many social science disciplines, so the positivism theory was being used in order to complete physiognomy positivism. [2] In the 19th century this is what positivism was mostly being used for but as time went on it started to be used for different types of photography styles. Originally, Sander did not categorize his physiognomy portraits about race. However, over time they started to be used and characterized to show your superiority based off of biblical writings. [3]Through the evolutions of physiognomy, you can see that something that was used to identify origin and potentially similarities between people of the same race can turn into something completely different. It ended up turning into something about superiority and used for people to figure out your race for intentions that physiognomy was not originally used for, because this was in a negative context. This is a great example that as life changes, the purpose of what a specific item is being used for changes, it could be for the good or bad, but it will evidently change over time.
Art is something that is very hard to define. Depending on the person, they could have a different perspective on what art is, because art is subjective. For instance, some people did not consider photography a form of art because there is machinery that helps produce the final result. Speaking of mechanical devices, these are the first trait that was used that lead scientists to trust in the accuracy of images. Mechanical devices were used as surveillance, then they would question the artists, and then they would look at the mechanical object itself to see how science played a role in the device itself. [4] Scientific insight into this process ended up helping the credibility of the artist. Before this occurred, the artists might not have been seen as credible because they have no proof of how the image was created or that they were the person to create the image. Since the traits were studied to make sure the images were trustworthy and accurate, they were able to prove they were the creator so their credibility, because they could prove that they were responsible for creating that piece of art. [5] This was a postive realization for the artist, they were now respobsible for the art they created and they were now seen as the one true artists of the piece and there was no confusion as to who the artist was.
There are many differences between Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric photos and Francis Galton’s composite portraits. The first big difference between the two is the title of the art. In the lecture slides, Alphonse Bertillon has a similar image to the image that is shown at the bottom of this assignment, the image in the lectures is titled mugshot card. On this card there is more than just an image, this is one significant difference between the two. On the card above and below the images there is information regarding the person on the card.
Regarding the Francis Galton portrait, it is a composite so there are many different elements combined together in each composite. There are also images that are combined from imaged that were already composites to get and even better picture. They are trying to get the best render, and that is happening from them creating composites from images that are already composites.
Another factor to take into consideration is that these two images were created at singificantly different time periods. In the 1800’s and 1900’s technology was constantly changing and that need to be taken into account when it comes to these two images. The Alphonse Bertillon image has a date on the card itself and that revealed that the image was created on January 26,1914. The Francis Galton was in the lecture slides and has a year date of 1883.
The passage from “The Body and the Archive” that reads “The projects of Bertillon and Galton constitute two methodological poles of the positivist attempts to define and regulate social deviance”[6] is letting us know that these two artists took two different approaches in trying to show us similar outcomes. The artists have the intent to show us different images and they were produced for completely different reasons. The understanding of why the images were created and what the images are trying to accomplish is important to the image and creates a story behind the image. The images had completely different backstories and purposes to them. The Alphonse Bertillon image had a political background and wanted to show what was going on for different classes during the third republic. Whereas the Francis Galton composite was created to show that there are genetic similarities based on your origin.
The main problem I see when it comes to the people being under surveillance and under control is a privacy issue. There is no sense of privacy for the people who are being watched. This also brings to light that the person might act different they originally because they are aware that they are under surveillance. However, there may be people that are unaware, and in the case images might be captured that are not appropriate or it is an image the person being watched never wanted the public eye to see.
In conclusion, there was a lot that was gone over in the text ‘The Body and the Archive’ alone. Time is constantly affecting events that happen, both with ‘the other’ as well as with physiognomy. Even though things were constantly changing, the majority of it was for the good, like with the scientific advances that led to photographs being accurate and truthful. There was also a lot of differences between the two images even though they were using similar methods in order to get two different points across. I think it is so incredible how much just the title can make to the piece of art. Also, the background or context of the image plays a very big part of the image itself. Throughout this assignment I was able to learn a lot of very interesting information. There is so much information in ‘The Body and the Archive’ and it was a difficult read, but there was a lot of good information in that text.
[1] Sekula, Allan. "The Traffic in Photographs." Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 18. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/776511, https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.chapman.edu/stable/776511?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=allan+sekula&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dallan%2Bsekula&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aab29c381b298a4d1eda30ab683773b82&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
[2] Sekula, Allan. "The Traffic in Photographs." Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 18. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/776511,https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.chapman.edu/stable/776511?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=allan+sekula&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dallan%2Bsekula&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aab29c381b298a4d1eda30ab683773b82&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
[3] Sekula, Allan. "The Traffic in Photographs." Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 19. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/776511, https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.chapman.edu/stable/776511?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=allan+sekula&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dallan%2Bsekula&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3Aab29c381b298a4d1eda30ab683773b82&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
[4] Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations, no. 40 (1992): 98. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/2928741, https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.chapman.edu/stable/2928741?seq=19#metadata_info_tab_contents
[5] Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. "The Image of Objectivity." Representations, no. 40 (1992): 99. Accessed March 29, 2021. doi:10.2307/2928741 https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.chapman.edu/stable/2928741?seq=19#metadata_info_tab_contents