The Body and the Archive

Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" positions the potentiality ascribed to the photographic medium within a historico-discursive moment, understanding the camera to be "a technological outpacing of already expanding cultural institutions" (4). A drive "to professionalize and standardize police and penal procedures" (4), he argues, played a crucial role in the development of material objects of a "truth apparatus", those technologies of "optical empiricism" (16).

Drawing upon Foucault's notions of a truth-power capable of producing subjects, Sekula investigates the perceived potential of photographs to play 'honorific' and 'repressive' functions, regulating the behavior of the masses.

He writes:

"The new [photographic] medium [did not simply inherit and 'democratize' the honorific functions of bourgeois portraiture. Nor did all police photography simply function repressively, although it is foolish to argue that the immediate function of police photographs was somehow more ideological or positively instrumental than negatively instrumental. But in a more general, dispersed fashion, in serving to introduce the panoptic principle into daily life, photography welded the honorific and repressive functions together. Every portrait implicitly took its place with a social and moral hierarchy." (10)

The fact that problematic experiments can be conducted to "characterize" and "categorize" the criminals and their bodies in the visuals speaks to the fact that we are attempting to put into order the physical traits of individuals in order to make an exposable pattern for the betterment of society. This apparatus, thus, seeks to accomplish the double task of producing subjects while adopting a visual means of establishing the truth about their 'invisible' nature through means of their visible physical traits.

Quote #2:

"The first rigorous system of archival cataloguing and retrieval of photographs was that invented by Bertillon. Bertillon's nominalist system of identification and Galton's essentialist system of typology constitute not only the two poles of positivist attempts to regulate social deviance by means of photography, but also the two poles of these attempts to regulate the semantic traffic in photographs. Bertillon sought to embed the photograph in the archive. Galton sought to embed the archive in the photograph" (pg.55 III)

Though Bertillon and Galton's archival practices differ, they both ultimately have the goals of preserving photographs for history, social truth and social control. Sekula remarks that while Bertillon tries to "tame" the photograph, Galton is ambitious and scientistic about the photograph in wanting it to do more. In his composite portraits, Galton manages to superimpose the faces of several criminals to produce what Sekula calls an "improved impression of l'homme moyen." (48). Galton's photographs, then, succeed in giving visual form to Quetelet's ideal average man.

What is at stake in the articulation of the individual and the mass body is that by processes of archiving photographs, we as humans are in control of now organizing the representations of the body and the experience into preservation for our disposals. Accordingly, as Sekula writes, Galton's project didn't merely produce an image that would be added to the archives of criminality: rather these composite photographs revealed "the vanished physiognomy of a higher race." (50)

How does the mass body here find its articulation in the index of the individual portrait? Could this composite portrait be thought of as indexical if it represents an almost transcendental subject? If the norms by which the individual and the mass are articulated find their expression in a ghostly physiognomy, then what can we say about the "positivities" produced by this optical apparatus?