Visual culture: edit Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall by SAGE Publications London * Thousand Oaks + New Delhi in association with UReR)Evidence, truth and order: a means of surveillance John Tagg Evidence, truth and order: photographic records and the growth of the state’ | Min the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the photographic ndustries of France, Britain and America, in common with other se the capitalist economy, underwent a second technical revolution wh the basis for a major transition towards a structure dominated by lane scale corporate monopolies. The development of faster dry plates and flexible film and the mass production of simple and conv graphic equipment opened up new consumer markets and accelerated the rowth of an advanced industrial organisation. At the same time, the rans tus and economy of image-making me dramatically as had the invention of the paper negative by Fox Talbot half century earlier. In the context of generally changing, patterns of i phy was poised for a new phase of rnalism, and the domestic market. It was xpansion into advertising, jo also open to a whole range of scientific and technical applications and supplied a ready instrumentation to a number of Fefor aphs function medical, legal and municipal apparatuses in which photoy as a means of record and a source of evidence. Understanding the role Photography in the documentary practices of these institutions means ygraph, and of generally, which were articulated into a wider range of techniques ar Procedures for extracting and evaluatis in discourse, Such techtion demanded the establishment of a new “regime of truth” and a new egime of sense’. What gave phot aphy its power to evoke a truth was not only the privilege attached to mechanical but also its mobilisation w ian chin the emerging apparatuses of a new and more penetrating form of t [| The pressing pr ocally and generally, was how to train and mobilise a diversified workforce while instilling lovility and practices of social obed -¢ within the dangerously large urban concentrations which advanced industrialisation ne tated. The problem was solved by re and more extensive interventions in the daily lie of the working class within and without the workplac h a growing complex of medical, institutions and began to take over the work of private and philanthropic agencies. Force was not, of course, absent. Local police forces and the administrative arms of the Poor Law were of central importance to the emerging local state, but even these could not operate by coercion alone They depended on a more general organisation of consent, on discipli techniques and a moral supervision which, at a highly localised an domestic level, secured the complex social relations of domination jon of capital depended. In a ightening knot, the local state pulled together the instrumentalities of and subordination on which the reproduc repression and surveillance, the scientifi the humanistic chetorie of social reform. By the closing decades of the century, bourgeois hegemony in the conomic, political and cultural spheres seemed beyond all challenge. [. . .] of a profound economic and social transformation, the ] ad been radically estructured. The explicit, dramatic and total power of the absolute | exercise of power in advanced capitalist societies h: ‘monarch had given place to what Michel Foucault has called a diffuse and Pervasive ‘microphysics of power’, operating unremarked in the smallest *\ duties and gestures oF everyday Tife. The seat of this capillary power was a new “technology: that constellation of institutions ~ including the hospital, | capitalist division of labour for the orderly conduct of social and economic { life. At the same time, the power transmitted in the unremitting surveil! ance of these new, disciplinary institutions generated a new kind of knowledge of the very subjects they produced; a knowledge which, in turn, rndered new effects of power and which was preserved in a ting system of documentation ~ of which photographic records were only quences of which we are still living — between a novel form of the nd x 1 new and developing technology of knowledge. A key to this technology rom the 1870s on was photography, and it is into the workings of the expanded state complex that we must pursue it, if we are to understand theof a modern photograp! Power that began to accrue to photography in the last quarter of th: nineteenth century. It is in the emergence, too, of new institutions of nable photo graphy to function, in certain contexts, as a kind of proof, even while an ideological contradiction was negotiated so that a burgeoning. photo Ty could be divided between the domain of artistic property knowledge that we must seek th mechanism which could graphic indy whose privilege, resting on copyright p of power, and the scientifico-technical domain, whose power was a func ‘ion of its renunciation of privilege. What we begin to sce is the emergence ic economy in which the so-called medium of mn, was a function of its lack Photography has no meaning outside its historical specifications, Wha the diversity of sites in which photography operates is the social formation itself: the specific historical spaces for representation and Practice which if Gonstitutes. Photography as such has_no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest tt. Ite ‘nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and lemibl only within the particu is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we mast study, not photography as su Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it Produces are highly coded, and the pawer it wields is never its own. As a ‘means of record, ie arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority to arrest, picture and transform daily life; a power to see and record; a power r currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It of surveillance that effects a complete re repre the power of the camera but the power of the apparatuses of the local stare which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or register a truth. If, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the squalid slum displaces the country seat and the ‘abnormal Physiognomies of patient and prisoner displace the aristocracy, then their presence in 1 sal of the political axis of -ntation which has confused so many labourist historians. This is not the pedigreed features of presentation is no longer a mark of celebration but a burden of subjection. A vast and repetitive archive of images is accumulated in which the smallest deviations may classified and filed. The format varies hardly at all. There are bodies and spaces, The bodies ~ workers, vag, oor, the colonised races are taken one by one: isolated in a shallow, contained space; turned full face and subjected to an unreturnable gave illuminated, focused, measured, numbered and named; forced to yield 10 the minutest scrutiny of gestures and features. Each device is the trace of a wordless power, replicated in countless images, whenever the photographer Prepates an exposure, in police cell, prison, mission house, hospital asylum, or school. The spaces, too ~ uncharted territories, frontier lands urban ghettos, work the same frontality and measured against an ideal space: a clear space, a healthy space, a space of unobstructed lines of sight, open to vision and criminals, patients, the insane, the class slums, scenes of erime ~ are confronted with supervision; a desirable space in which bodies will be changed into difree, orderly, docile and disciplined subjects; a space, in Foucaule's sense, « anew strategy of power-knowledge. For this is. what missionary explorations, in urban clearance, sanitary ceform and health supervision, in constant, regularised policing — and in the photography \which furnished them from the start with so central a technique These are the strands of a ravelled history tying photography to the state. They have to do not with the “externals’ of photography, as cli ieve, but with the very conditions which | ygraphic images, the | 1¢ range and limits of their effectiveness regis of ph cerms of their legibility, and ickdrops to set off the p scored inito the paltry paper signs, in what they do and do no formance of images, T they encompass and exclude repertoire of uses in which they ean be meaningful and productive. Photo. graphs ate never “evidence” of history; they are themselves the historical i SS A means of surveillance: the photograph as evidence in law In the decades of the 1880s and the 1890s [. . .] photograpl tion of cheaply printed half-tone blocks and, on the other hand, the mass production of simple and convenient photographic equipment, such hand-held Kodak camera. At the very moment when cer photographers were seeking, in reaction, to exhibit th Il_kinds of refinement of printing technique, this double revolution ling, on the one hand, the mass produc ain professional ipped the image of what Walter Benjamin called its ‘aura’ by flooding he marker with 1eap and disposable photo-mechanical and by giving untrained masses the means to picture themselves. While aesthetes and pictorial photographers sought to salvage some prestige by preserving superseded techniques and arguing for the autonomy of photo ing technical develop: expansion of photography in the far from autonomous realms of adver went ensured the va graphy as an art, an un tising, of the family as a reconstructed unit of consumption, and of a whole range of scientific, technical, medica d political apparatuses in which photography functioned as a means of record and a source of I is into the workings of these institutions that we must pursue to understand the power that began to accrue to it in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It is in the emergence, too, of new institutions of knowledge that we must seek for the mechanism whichaas could enable photography to function, in certain contexts, as a kind of even while an ideological contradiction was negotiated so that Photographic practice could be divided between the domain of art, whee brivilege is a function of its lack of power, and the scientifice technical domain, whose power is a function of its renunciation of privilege This analysis of power and photography will take us far beyond the boundaries of conventional art history int institutional spaces of the fiodern state. Our starting point must be power itself and the attempts that its Functionings. In rough and ready terms, | and how do we find power working; how may this power be opposed and how does it produce its own resittanes Clearly, the answers, however sketchy and provisional, will have defini ' both for the history and practice of photography. We must about power to discover where and how it touches photo know mon graphy Power in the West, Foucaul itself best.” ‘Political life’, with its carefully staged debates, provides a lag theatre of power ~ an imag how it fonctions. The relations of power are among the best hiilen things in the social body, which may be why they are among the least studied ‘Onr the Teft;-the- dominant ta reductive Marxism, has tended to neglect relations of elementary power in says, is what displays itself mast and hides but itis nor there that power lies; nor is that Following an orthodox and its concentration on the determining effectivity of the economy: It hes len tended to see power only in the form of state power, wielded in che apparatus of the state, and has thus participated in the very ideology of ower which conceals its pervasive workings. {J In the classic texts of Marx and Lenin, too, the state is con ceived as an explicitly repressive apparatus, a machine of repression which Suarantees the domination and subjection of the working clase ruling class. It consists of specialised apparatuses such as the police th law courts and the prisons, but also government and the administration. All these apparatuses execute their functions and intervene according to ‘the interests of rhe ruling class’ in a class war conduc agains ig classes. Whatever th tion in casting light on all the direct and indirect forms of exploitation nod army and, above this ensemble, the head of state, ¢ d by the ruling class and its allies he dominated worki value of this de domination [, | it also prevents us seeing certain highly pertinent feature features it has become imperative to understand in highly developed modern states. [. . J The theoretical development of the classic Marxist view of the state n keeping with these demands, received new impetus in the analyses o French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who took up the relatively ystematised distinction made in the Prisom Notebooks of the leahan Communist leader, Antonio Gramsci, between the institutions of eralciety ~ the Church, the schools, the trade unions, and so on — and thse of the state apparatus proper.> Gramsci saw that the state had undergone a crucial change of function in Western bourgeois democracies, so that its real strength could no long understood only as the apparatus of government, the politico-juridicial organisation, but demanded attention t he ‘private’ apparatuses of “hegemony” or civil society through which thi bourgeois class sougl and economic level. In his more rigid theoretical framework, Althusser state into two domains or kin arily-and predominantly by ‘physical force’, and that which functioned primarily and predominantly “by ideology’. Iris the state ly by force, procure the political conditions for the action of the ‘Ideological Stare Apparatuses’ — the educational, religious, family, political, trade-union, communications and ‘cultural apparatuses ~ which, acting behind a ‘shield’, largely secure the repro: logical State Apparatuses the side of the repressive State Apparatus’, but they m confused with it, They are distinct, specialised and ‘relatively autonomous’ institutions which constitute a phirality {. . .). "No class’, Althusser says, can hold state power over a long period without at the same ti xercising its hegemony over and in the Stare Mdeological Apparatuses.”* There is still in Althusser's theo ical amplification something of an dea of power as a privilege to be captured and then exercised: a kind of fluid’ which may be ‘poured’ into an apparatus as into a vessel. We shal come on to further difficul which arise from his attempt to maintain a strict distinetion between the State Apparatuses and the Ideological State Apparatuses on the basis of their respective primary functioning by force and ideology. Above all, the anomalies in Althusser's account arise from his conception of preconstituted class identities ‘med in possession of pret ideologies, which contend for control of the Ideological State Apparatuses which ideology. Too often, Althusser sees the Ideological St merely instruments for propounding and enforcing the ruling te Appaca rr than the site of class strugele |. . .|. What he does not show is that it is in tl that the ideological level is constituted, of ne stake, ra © apparatuses themselves ssity including chat post tionality which constitutes class identity This said, a decisive step has been taken towards seeing power power still conceived as ‘state’ power ~ in more thai’ iis repressive func tions; towards a total explanation which incorporates those apparently peripheral and indepen ions such as the family, the school and. within which production takes place; and towards the most important realisation that, if these apparatuses function ‘by ideology’, by interpellat ing individual subjects in the positions created for them by the st technical division of labour, chen ‘an ideology always exists in an atus, and its practice, of practices. This existence is material.° Part of the value of Althusser's account resides, therefore, in thenthe French historian Michel Foucault who has done most to clabor ate this materialist analysis in the concrete domain of real history |. [He has studied the genea of a cluster of institutions which, born of the profound reorg uties, have secreted new and connected discourses about and with them: discourses which themselves function as formidable tools of control and power, [Seeig,” "tlm of ober Bodh. at. abc free am It is in the context of the dev a discursive formation in the eighe: ention; the recor stitution of homosexuality as illness in the new medical and. psychiatric pment of s that Foucault has seen the chologising of the female b centh century, as the object of an immense medical analyses of the 1870s; the “discovery” of ‘mental illness’ in the workings of the asylums the generation of delinquency in the new apparatus of the Prison and the evolution of the new pseud these are p ts ~ the hospital, the he prison, the school, the barracks — exercisin techniques and acting with pi individuated subjects. In his studies of the ‘birth’ of this constellation « institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Foucault opens up that bears directly and physically upon the body ~ like the eamera’s gave = yet is also a knowledge. This knowledge and this mastery constitute what he calls the political technology of the body: a diffuse and multiform instrumentation which cannot be localised in a particular type of instt. ' tion or state appar of a “ier tween the great functionings and the bodies them ipherable only in_a network of physics’ of p | which go right dawn into the depths of society this ew type oF society, has drained deeply into the estures, actions, discourses and practical knowledge A body itself is inve Power everyday lives. The ced by power relations through which ie certain ‘political economy’, trained, supervised, tortured if necessary, perform ceremonies, to exercised in, and not just on, thi X century, power has taken on it signs. Power is social body because, since the ‘capillary existence’. The great political upheaval which brought the bourgeoisie to power and established its hegemony across the social order was effected not only in the readjustment of those centralised institutions which constitute the political regime, but in an insistent and insidious modification of the everyday forms of the exercise of power. What this amounted to was the constitution of a new type of régime discovered in the ei legal complex impregnated with a new technology ol [. .-] What was new in the late eighteenth centut ned and generalised was that, by being techniques which made up this technology attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of [power regularly reinfo ced one another in a circular process. |ut nent of the police force was integral to this process of chany n in the eighteenth century and effecte: which beg al ism, a decisive shift from the total power of the monarch to the infinitely in the era of capi small exercise of power necessary to the discipline and productive tation of bodies accumulated in large numbers. In exp der tobe effective, y of power needed an instrument of permanen xhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long of the police offered just ‘uch a means of control which could be present in the very king population, under the alibi of a criminal th od across a set of 's ranging In England, it was in the latter half of sit could itself remain invisible. The institut st of the he penitentiary to ww apparatu the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century that syure grew to replace with a more rigorously organised force the inefficient system of aid constables and watchmen which had failed to control crime and disorder in rowns swollen by great concentrations of factory workers. [| Manufacturers pressed for g ter discipline in work and leisure in the factory towns, Methodists and ‘humanitarians’ called for order, submis siveness and the suppression of vice. Reformers argued that a more effective preventive police was absolutely necessary to guard over property From the founding of Henry Fielding’s Bow Steeet Foot and Horse Patrol in London in 1748 till the middle years of the next century, the case was pressed and pressed again for a full-tim 1, uniformed police force. All kinds of official and semi-official forees grew up in the cities, especially around the ports, canals and navigable rivers where property was acstake, Yet there was still ac n, and not alone from the radical sections of the populace who always saw the oppression’. In 1812, the idea of a centralised force was still seen by one commentator as ‘a system of tyranny; an organised army of spies and informers, for the destruction of all public liberty, and the disturbance of all rivate happiness’.” A parli Bentham’s proposals for a Ministry of Police ‘a plan which would make every servant of every house a spy on the actions of his master, and all ncerted oppo as an ‘engine of ntary committee of 1818 saw in Jeremy ty spies on cach other." There was no guarantee that the gaze of surveillance would be fixed in one dxection. Merchar sail feared and industrialists any powers of inspection which might lead to searches of the houses and premises of those suspected of evading regulations. Older vested rests were also threatened by the new pervasive mechanisms of power Te s. Whigs feared an inctease in the power of central government. [ |...) Under the Act fof Parliament of 1829], 3,000 blue-uniformed ies feared an overriding of parochial and chartered n divisions under a hierarchy of superintendents, inspec rors and sergeants, controlled by a commissioner and ultimately re sible to the Home Secretary, were g wven jurisdiction over the area of a s around Charing Cross. Despite continued aj 18 abolition, the force was bolstered by the appointment of the first specialconstables in 1831, and systematically extended, first to all urban England and Wales [...| and then to che counties and rural areas |... [A regular inspectorate was set up to mn the widely disp abvlaries. I fay, the powers and duties o constable which derived from the ancient common law of Englat subsumed but also transformed in the new police constable, who was member of a disciplined force, subject to strict codes and a hierarchy inspection and supervision [. . {Jt was the police which installed the new power-know! nexus in the very heart of working-class | he walls of the new discip. inary and reformacory institu special kind of abservatic lated series and registers. From the eighteenth and nineteenth « onward, an immense police text came increasingly 1 cove means of a complex documentary organisation. Bu differ markedly from the traditional methods of judicial or adminis. trative writing. What was registered in it were forms of conduct, attitudes, Possibilities, suspicions: a permanent account of individuals’ behaviou Now is pethaps the moment to turn to the complicity of photogeaphy ir this spreading network of powe arly years of the development of th Photographic process coincided approximately with the introduction of the police service into this country, and for more than a hundred years ‘wo have progressed together. As phot« raphic pre cesses and equipment have been evolved and refined, so have police forces of photo the purposes of identification was police at a very early stage. Though su only became possible with the introduction of faster Petzval lenses and 1841, the police employed civilian photographers from the 1840s onwards. The West Midlands Pole Museum has a file of twenty-three ambrotypes of Birmingham prisoners aken by an unknown photographer in the 1850s and 1860s. The poses a simple and plain, but the delicare glass plates are each mounted in an mental frame, as if they were destined for the mantelpiece. Other ost likely that at this aphers who were hot yet members of the police force itself. The great growth of specialised police photog time the work was carried out by professional pho aphers followed the successful development of Sir Edward Henry’s system of identification by m ns of fingerprints, introduced ai New Scotland Yard in 1901. It soon became apparent that the only way to record finger impressions found at the sce‘© photograph them, and increasing numbers of police photographers were engaged co make best use of the specialised rechniques Many thousands of identification pictures are now taken each yea nnd the prints filed, together with the prisoner's fing prints, at the Cencral Criminal Record Office and at Regional Record Centzes. The police in this country have no authority to photograph an accused person who objects, but if necessary an application for a remand in custody enables the prison rnor to take the prisoner's photograph under an authority granted by tion 16 of the Prison Act of 1952. Governors of prisons, remand centres, detention centres and Borstal institutes are themselves required by thi Criminal Justice Act of 1948 to register and photograph all. pe convicted of crime, but these powers go back to 1870 (see figure 16.1). Ac of the Alien Order Act of 1920 also empowered police officers to order the phot aphing of any alien. The photographs required, how ver, were to be full-face, with head uncovered, They did not yet have to follow the standardised format of full-length, full-face and profile, laid down by the Committee of Crime Detection Report of 1938, which rndeavoured to improve the ality of prisoners’ ph sm of lighting and equipment to be used. What we have in this standardised image is more than a picture of a supposed criminal. It is a portrait of the product of the diseiplmary-method: the ina cellular stru of space whose architectare-is the file-index; made docile and forced to yield up its truch; separated and individuated; subjected and made subject. W The use of photogs js to be made quick! body made object; divided and stadiedy enctox and cheaply, is clearly underpinned by a whole set of assumptions about thy Photograph which we shall hi Tet us accept that, given this conception of photography, it could be and has been extended to most aspects of police work until, today, almost the still image accessible video techniques and even ality of the photograph anid the real ‘in’ the fe £0 examine more closely. For the moment. every photog api phic process and technique is in use; thoug may be svethauled by m ygrams. The production of photographs for court evidence is now standard practice. Photographs are used to assist in the conteol traffic and in the prosecution of traffic offences; to record evidence of had driving from mobile police pateol cars; to help assess and apportion blame in fatal accident cases before the coroner's court th photo-micrographic analysis of forensic evidence; to present visual evi to provide accurate 1e scenes of crime and of clues found there; to demonstrate the ‘¢ to juries in the court room of wounding, cord and deter offences against nerd 5; to detect forgeries and questionable oduce them to observe unruly behaviour at hes and other places of assembly; to suevey road junctions om overlooking buildings, nominally for the purposes of planning traffic flow but also to observe the movements of crowds andSan M Maye hillr..ds4 Las end Mliases Opel ic eiToiom — Rewtie ok (Bain uileg mas Fack Description: Gidress ablimen ajjerehension 9 Kal Shia 7H Site En (Clase and Dale 43 conviction — asthe es tin ys Gjjemee jor uhuth eonmeled— Sovipie Seren, tha Whistle oop tira UAB ryeheardrlabd ukigeet i rahe Hip, argued Ni Sniended rescence afler liberalien—, 4 demonstrations; to catalogue the activities of suspected persons who are ation; to prove adultery or cohabitation in divorce or social security proceedings. The list is not exhaustive However, it is not only the police and the prisons wh photography such a convenient tool for their new steategies of examine any of the other institutions who: find photography seated calmly within the century on, photogeaphy had its role to play the hospital, the asylum, che reformatory and the family and the press, in the Improvement Trust, the Ordnance Survey and the expeditionary force have found ower. If we genealogy Foucault traces, we From the mid-nineteenth the workings of the factory school, as it did in theIn 1856, Dr Hugh Welch Diamond, founder member of the Royal Photographie Society and resident superintendent of the , Female Department of the Surrey County i Lunatic Asylum, read a paper to the Royal Society “On the Application of Photography to the Physiognomic and Mental Phenomena = of Insanity’ In it, he expounded his theories fon ‘the peculiar application of photography to the delineation of insanity’, and he llustrated his arguments with photographs nthe Surrey Asylum (see figure 16.2). Dr Diamond proposed that clinical photography had important functions in the psychiatric prac he had taken, at his own expense tices of the day. First, it acted as an aid 10 d value ‘in the effect which they produce | treatment. Photographic portraits ceases they are examined with much pleasure and interest, but more particularly in those which mark the progress and cure of a severe| tack of Mental Aberration.""? Secondly, these porteaits furnished a permanent record for medical guidance and physiognomic analysis: Cn The Photographer secures with unerring accuracy the external phenomena of . each passion, as the really certain indication of internal derangement, and tm exhibits to the eye the wellknown sympathy which exists between che , diseased brain and the organs and features of the body ... The Photographer catches in a moment the petmanent cloud, or the passing storm or sunshine : f the soul, and thus enables the metaphysician to witness and trace out the connexion between the visible and the invisible in one important branch of his researches into the Philosophy man rind." Central to Diamond's conception of photography as a method of procuring a new kind of knowledge was the idea expressed in The Lancet that: ‘Photography is so essentially che Are of Truth ~ and the represen: ive of Truth in Art ~ that it would seem to be the essential means of reproducing all delineation.”!? The links of d description, ms and structures of which science seeks for chain are truth, knowledge, observation as extolled e the optical and chemical processes of photography were taken to ssentation, record. The value of the camera becau designate scientifically exploited bur ‘natural’ mechanism produci s whose truth was guaranteed. Photography presented “a perfect and faithful recor irogether f lished portraits of the insane as to the painful caricaturing, which so disfigures almost all the prender them nearly valueless either for purposes of art or of science was free, too, from the imprecisions of verbal language i rerapher needs in many cases no aid from any language of his own, but prefers ro listen, with the picture before him, co che silent buc telling language of na the picture speaks for itself with the most marked precision and indicates the exact point which has been reached in the scale o unhappiness between the frst sensation and its utmost height The science of the insane could now go beyond the prosaic descriptions of psychiatrists such as Esquirol or Heinroth: Photos: as is evident from the portraits which illusteate eis confirms and extends this description, and that to such a degree as warrants the conclusion that the permanent records thus furnished are at once the most What is ‘evident’ from Diamond's photographs, however, is that thei naturalness and concision were the products of a complexly_coded intertextuality. As in early police photographs, the props those of a simple studio, the backgrounds plain, the poses frontal or near frontal, and a In conception and organisation, Diamond's picture descended from Philippe Pinel’s categorisation of the insane and the ghtcenth-century physiognomy and phrenology. In their pictorial realisa rention was directed towards the face lier typologies of they drew not only on the conventions of cor cemporary portraiture but also on the already developed codes of medical and psychiatric illus sand engravings of works such as J. E. D. Esquirol’s Des Maladies Mentales of 1838 or the Physiognomy of Mental Diseases published in the same year by Sit Alexander Morrison, Diamond's predecessor at the Surrey Asylum. What was remarkable in’ Diamond's work = for it was not unique, but tration found in the line draw pified a whole tendency in nineteenth: century photographic practice - was its constitution at the point where discourses of psychiatry, physiognomy, photogeaphic science and aesthetics coincided and overlapped. But the site where they could work together a con each other was a regulated space, a political space, a space in the new institutional order. Here, the knowledge and truth of which photography me the guardian were inseparable from the power and con gendered, ‘The point was not lost on Dr Diamond. His last argument for clinical photography was that it functioned as a means of rapid identification: rol which they Its well known that the portraits of those who ate congregated in pris punishment have often times been of much value in recapturing some who have escaped, or in proving with and with certainty a previous conviction; and similarly the portraits of the insane who ate received ints Asylums for protection, give to the eye so clear a represent that on their readmission after temporary absence and cure ~ 1 have foundPrevious portrait of more value in calling to my mind he case and verbal description Imay have placed on record.”® The methods of the new police force are not far away. Commenting on Diamond's paper, T. N. Brushfield, superintendent of the Chester County Lunatic Asylum, confirmed his view In the case of criminal lunatics, it is frequently of great importance that a portrait should be obtained, as many of them being originally of eximinat disposition and education, if they do esca from the asylum are doubly dangerous to the community at large, and they may frequently be traced by sending their photographs to the police authorities (into whose hands they are very likely t0 fall) from some act of depredation they are hs would thus cause them to be identified, and secute Here, in the tentative photographie practice of Dr Diamond and like minded superintendents of asylums, is the nexus Foucault describes: the e of an eve very coincide fe intimate observation and an eve fined institutional order and_an ever ¢ ‘encompassing discourse; an ever more passive subjection and an ever more dominant benevolent gaze. There are other examples. Henty Hering photographed patients in the Bethlem Hospical in the mid-1850s. In 1860, Charles Le Negre was ordered to compile a photographic report on the | Asylum at Vincennes. Photographs af mentally retarded children were reproduced in The Mind Unveiled in 1858. B.A. Morel’s Traité des dégénérescen: morales de Uespéce humaine et des causes que produisent ses variétés condition of inmates in the Imp s physiques, intellectuelles et ‘maladises, published in Paris in 1857, included illustrative photographs caken by Baillarger at the Salpétriére, where, in the 1880s, Charcot and Richer were to open a Photographic Department to aid their preparation of the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpétriére. Whereas, before the invention of photography, clinical records had freakish cases, with the camera, extensive collections and indexes were] l. The first paper on medical photography had been published in| in 1855."* The first journal devoted to the subject, the Inter nationale medizinisch-photographische Monatschrift appeared in Leipzig in 1894. It was not a development to be stopped by complaints th: heen confined to. spectacular-or| Austria unbridled use of photography in medical practice had gone beyond discretion and ethics.” Such uses of photography were not, however, confined to medicine In the 1860s, the Stockport Ragy local photogeapher to assemble an album of pictures of each of the teachers and children in the school (see figure 16.3). Similar rec kept in the Greenwich Hospital School. Th and Industrial School commissioned a next decade, the 1870s, saw a fgreat expansion in the use of photographic documentation. The main prisons, such as Wandsworth and Millbank Prisons and Pentonville Peni up their own studios employing staff photographers. LocalPious 163 authorities commissioned photographic surveys of housing and living conditions in working-class areas, and private societies, such 4s the Socier for Photographing Relics of Old London, were founded. Children’s Homes and Homes for “Waifs and Strays’ also followed the pattern of develop ‘ment, initially employing local portrait photographers, then taking. phot sraphers on to their staff. In May T874, Thomas Toh clo opened his first Photographie Department in the "Home for Destitute Lads’ which he had founded at seway in 1871. In its firse year, the studio and and assistant absorbed more than £250 out of an annual budget of £11,571, and photography remained thereafter sn important item of expenditure. Between 1874 and 1905, Thomas Barnes and his successor, Roderick Johnstone, produced 55,000 photographs fos children as they entered salaries of photograp! Barnardo, mostly systematic records o and left the institution. The uses of the photographs were familiar by nowsin and retain an exact likeness of each child and enable them, when it is attached to his history, to trace the child’s career To make the recognition easy of boys an is guilty of criminal acts, such as theft, burglary or arson, and who may, under false pre to our Homes, Many hese photographs has enabl gain admission 1 us to communicate with he police, or with former employers, and thus led to the discovery of offenders. By means of these likenesses children absconding from our Homes are often recovered and brought back, and in not few in nces, juveniles who have been stolen mn theie parents or guardians or were tempted by evil companions to leave ring for a while on the streets, found their way ecognised by parents or friends and finally restored to theie care Chronological reference albums were kept by the photographers, in which the albumen prints were pasted tw c, with the names und dates of the children written under each photograph. Barnardo himself kept smaller versions, with three photographs to a page, for his own use and to show visitors, parents and police. Photographs were also mounted ‘sonal history sheets on which were filed printed details of child’s background — sometimes including the child’s own st statistics of colouring, age, height, and subsequent reports and photo: graphs recording the child’s pro figure 16.4). Since Barnardo’s Homes were neither ‘voting charities’ nor sponsored by any of the churches, their need for funds was always acute. This induced Barnardo to launch an extensive publicity and advertising cam paign which exploited the methods of the successful American revivalist Churches. Such methods were controversial, In particular, it was 88 ( Barnardo's use of photography ‘to aid in advocating the claims of our institution’ which brought him, in 1877, before a court of arbitration on several accounts of dishonesty and misconduct arising from allegations by the Reverend George Reynolds and the Charity Organisation. Spe it was charged that: (‘The system of takin and making capital of, the children’s photographs is not only dishonest, but has a tendency to destroy the better f gs of the children . . He is not satisfied h taking them as they really are, bat he tears their clothes, 50 a8 t0 make them appear worse than they really a 1 | They are also taken in purely fictitious positions.” rom 1870, Barnardo had commissioned ‘before-and-after’ photographs, | purporting to show the children as chey arrived at the Home and then, | Scrubbed and clean, busy in the workshops. It was one such comparative pairing that the court ruled to have been an ‘artistic fiction’. More than lets {rom the iniguities of a previous life and of a happy “ghty stich pictures were published, however. Some appeared in par | telling a story of reseu life in the Home. Others were pasted on ro complimentary cards of theAddmitied January th, 1876. Aged 16 Years Height, aft. 1 (Mair, Dark Brown Uses, Brown Complexion, Dark Marks om body-—N Mf Vaccinated Right Arm, Uf ever been im @ Reformatory or Industrial School ? No, ‘once a litle vagrant ~ now a little workman’ type, which also gave det of the work of the Home and sold in packs of twenty for five shillings ti singly for sixpence. To the theme of observatign-domination was a that of advertising and the body as We have begun to etitive pattern: the body isolated; narrow space; the subjection to an unretumnable gaze, the scrutiny 4 westures, faces and features; the clarity of illumination and sharp of focus; the names and number boards. These are the traces of powely | repeated countless times, whenever the photographer prepared an expontty police cell, prison, consultation room, asylum, Home or school (see fig 16.5). Foucault's metaphor for the new social order which was inscribed M4 these smallest exchanges is that of the ‘Panopticon’ ~ Jeremy BenthamHUNTINGDON COUNTY G01 ‘Cain Aa (360, San ot Soe Ne 2 Ai one tain. Lecanto hoes of a eae pace and level would be exposed hain of obse ‘ plan for a model institution in which ea view of another, establishing a perpetual culminated in the central cower, itself open to constant pul vocated a Ministry of Police but, This is the same Jeremy Bent! an structure was to become with che development of photography, his uto redundant, Bentham’s “Panopticon’ was eady claborated across a range of culmination and concrete bodiment of a disciplinary nasteries, teformatories, prisons ~ in institutions ~ barracks, schools, which a temporal-spatial technology, with its enclosed architectural spaces,{ Ks wt 9 Pt 262 cellular oxganisation, minutely graded hierarchical arrangements, and precise divisions of time, was set to work todril, train, classify and survey bodies in one and the same m that continual process of proliferating local tactics and techniques which ‘operated in society on a micro level, seeking to procure the maxit the minimum effort and manufacturin «by th argued, the ew will ro power, founded on a fateful threefold unity of knowledge, control and utility, could find a new metaphor in the unobtrusive cells of the photo- araphic frame; in its ever more minute division of time and motion; in its ever finer scrutiny of bodies in stringent laboratory conditions. It is a world for which the exhaustive catalogue of bodily movements in Muybridge’s cement. Foucault cook this as a metaphor for end of the nineteenth century, it could be images stands as an ominous sign. v To reiterate the point, it should be clear that wi power he is not of prohibition 50 not only en Foucault examines mining a negative force operating through a series sn where prohibitions can be shown to operate, t rough edicts or laws but in the reality of institutions and ) practices where they are part of an elaborate economy including all kinds of incitements, manifestations and evaluations — in short, an entire com: plex, outside which prohibitions cannot be understood. We mu: once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms ~ as exclusion, repression, censorship, concealment, eradication, ln Produces It produces reality, It produces domains of objects, inst of language, rituals of truth, [. . .) ae a - We might remember, for example, that Marx did not explain the misery of workers, as Proudhon did, as the effect of a concerted thelt. He saw that the positive functioning of capitalist production — capitalism's raison d’étre ~ was not dieected towards starving the workers, but that it could not develop without doing so, Marx replaced a negatives moralistic analysis with a positive one: the analysis of production. So Foucault, in examining the ‘Birth of the prison, looks for the possible positive effects of hhanisms rather than their repressive effects alone. Fle sees the punitiv development of penal institutions aF-a political tactic ina more general field of ways of exercising power. Sin asylum, he asks: how did the power exerted in insanity produce psy chiatry’s ‘true’ discourse? When he turns to sexuality, he is concerned to discover why it has been the central object of exa ance, avowal and transformation into discourse in Christian societies. [...] Crucial to the development of his thematic hasbeen Foucault's scjection of the idea that knowledge and-power are somehow count posed, antithetical or ever separable. [._.| For Foucault, power produces Knowledge. Power and knowledge directly imply one another. The exercise of power itself creates n accumulates new bodies of information. Diffused and entrenched, the larly, in studying the genesis of th id causes to emerge new objects of owledge andknowledge constantly induces effects of powe 1 oucault’s aim, therefore, is not to write the social history of pro: hibitions but to crace the political history of the production of humanity as an object of knowledge for a discourse with the status of ‘science’, the status of ‘truth’. As a prerequisite for such a study, he offers us a new set of amsei’s conception of hegemony Althusser's conceptions of Ideological State Apparatuses and ‘scientific’ k nowledge. Mase thas this, it must direct our attention ro a new and distinct level: that of mechanisms which cannot be reduced to theories, though they overlap them; which cannot be identified with apparatuses or institutions, though they are based fon them; and which cannot be derived from moral choices, though they ind their justification in morality. These are modalities according, fi‘ which power is exercised: the technologies of power “if In analysing these ‘technologies’, Foucault uncovers a stratum of materials which have so far remained below the threshold of historical visibility. His discoveries have importance hoth for new and old themes in of photography. For example, with the rowth of the tech arose about the individuals it was intended to transform. Tt was a curiosity which had been entirely unknown at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the function of courts at this time, f no need to understa conditions of the crime. Once guile had been established, a set of penalties was automatically brought nto play that were proportionate and fixed. Yer by the early nineteenth] ntury, In France, Britain and the USA, judges, were secking new techniques to gain a knowledge newly necessary to the doctors and criminologists | administration of power, Prisoners were encouraged to write down their life stories. Dossiers and case histories were compiled. The simple tech nique of the examination was brought into play, evokin hildren, on the sick and insane. [. . J The emergence of the ‘documentary’ as evidence of an individual ts use on soldiers| ase’ was tied to this development oF the examination and a certain disciplinary method, and to that crucial inversion of the political axis of individuation which is integral to surveillance: dy ~ remained below the threshold of description, To be looked at, observed, described in detail, followed from day 10 day by an uninterrupted of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold bua document for possible use. And this new desctibablty all the more arked in that the disciplinary framework is a strict one: the child, the patient, the madman, the prisoner, were to be} procedure of heroisations it hu tions as a dure of objectification at which each individual receives as bis status his own indivadualte od which he linked by his status 0 the features, the measurements, the ware ‘marks’ that characterise him and make him a ‘cane {rs not only the ‘turning of real lives ineo writing” which is imp Gited in this process hutalso the insatiable appropriauons of the camer, Whether it is John Thomson in the streets of London (figure lene Thomas Annan in the slums of Glasgow (figure 16.7); whether it be h Ryamond among the female inmates of his asylum in Surrey or Arthe Munby among the trousered pit-irls of Wigan; whether it is Jacob Riis of 1876: what we see is among the ‘poor’, the “idle” and the ‘vicious’ of Mulberry bs Hooper am vietims of the Madras fami \. < the extension of a ‘proces \ transmission of power in the synaptic space of the camera's examinatior Whatever the claims of the traditional evaluations of such phe Braphic ‘records’, whatever the pretentions of the humane” and don torical problems with which Foucault concerns himself: problems of the cntry of the individual into the ficld of knowledge, of the enrey of 4h individual description, of the cross-examination and the file. isin who { he calls these ‘ignoble’ archives thar Foucault sees the emergence of rh. modern play over bodies, gestures and behaviour which is the emergence vi 1 There is ad tional intellectuals may become too dispersed and fragmentay Particular struggles of photographers av What give such sectional actions a wider significance ate their prec ions in that network of constraints which produces truth and wha.) | totum, induces the reqilar effects of power. That i say, what's cen | '8 their special position in the ‘political economy’ of ruth m our sexier, ey | which Foucault has given the name of ‘a régime of truth FA régime of truth is that circular relation which truth has te sh systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to the effects of sa which it induces and which redirect it. Such a régime has been nor ovly effect, but a condition of the formation and developn 1 of capit Societies; to contest it, however, itis not enough to gesture at somene, somehow emancipated from every system of power. Truth itself aleproduces it. We must forget the claims of a discredited decur tradition to fight ‘for’ ‘teuth’ or in favour’ of ‘truth’ and see that the Iu is one that should be directed ac the rules, operative in our sox cling to which ‘true’ and “false” representations are separated. It battle waged against thoxe institutions privileged and empowered in our to produce and transmit ‘true’ discourse. It is a battle reyond the sectoral ane! professional interests of photography ~ around ¢h specitic e power of this truth and the economic and potitical role i play The questions which are raised by 2 conception of t 1 truth’ revolve around the conditions of possibility of struggle inthe particular domain of photogeaphy. How is photographic discourse relate to those privileged discourses harboured in our socicty and caused to h produce them? What are the Lalschood are to be distinguished and how do they bear on photography? What are the techniques and procedures sanctioned as those which may b begin to flow? How ecovery of a pristine ‘cruth” bur the effective displacement of the status of ruth and the economic and political role it plays? What would it mean in litical, economic and institutional régime of the production of truth, to detach its power from the specific forms of hegemony in which it now Uoperates, and co project the possibility of constructing a new politics of ith The territory of che dispute must be clear, You will see that we ar hrown back again on that knot of assumptions about the nature’ of hotography which was left ro he unravelled in my discussion of police hotography. Iris the use of the photograph in police work — primarily fe wale as evidence’ — and the insertion of the photograph in vil A youd record should of course be properly exp“ops ae EE ef erranenens truestA photograph should inclade everything appertain relevant to is purpose. I thin ‘cannot be done with onte picture then others the whole sul must be taker in order tha et iy covered, Pho aps of Sera ee eee cee ne age cee ion with a detailed plan ts seal and enal Picture to be obtained Phorographs made ior the puepose of crime detection or tr ret any court proceedings should non he 1 touched, treated or matked in ane fay. Pxagnerated lighting eflccts must not be ave and deep shades or reduce the valicy os evidence burtout highlights con oF an atherwine good record picture Ph ls where possible, he taken trom eve level a annlcs to teatfaccidett photographs where the vee ty divers cerned may be an important fen rin ars usally pestered om the “sit sles because detail i mare important than print brightess The police photographer sho has in mind the i record photograph will standardise his pr eure and technique am border that the right type o photograph is produced a Seconuly, on the mode of presentation af the images 4h producing. photographs eo court tl ‘oath the time, day and date he police ph he took the pha Faphs, and the fave that hy himself. He then proxhives the ne they have noe been retinche Drovessed the negatives ALIVE 20 shiny that ‘J or interfered with in any way, and tinatle Proxtuces prints (usually en that cannot be done, an affidavit sworn by the technician whe the film or even the technician in person will hogs the chain of possession. Final, processed (0 be produced t prove +09 the status of the photographer. ve witness to the ‘truth: A qualified py ice photographer with the necessary experience may ‘Grandad & a0 expert witnes and competent within hs own heey spre 2 opinion if asked by the court to de so, Fe an opinion is called for the cout places a reat deal of reliance on the qualifications and gc follows thar every police photogeaphe Perience of the witness. should take every apportunity to all necessary qualifications by examination possible experience nd should also gai every in the specialised fields of photugraphy appereanne Bis work. If this is done, hisevidence will stand op ve thee expert who may be calle 1 t0 rebut his testimony.Confirmation of these basie conditions and the standard British and American work of reference on photoxraphn evidence by S. G. Ehrlich, a specialist in the preparation of court exhibits, Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and member of The Ametican Society of Photographic Scientists and Engineers. Ehrlich is at pains to define the exact requirements of photography as an aid to counsel in civil cases so as to distinguish it from amateur, provedures comes trai freelance or photojournalistic practive. But behind his detailed technical discussion lies the notion that In addition 10 understanding the scientific principles of physics, optics and hemistry on which photography depend, the good photographer must have the imagination and creative ability ¢o reproduce scenes on fils so that they wall convey to the viewer the same information and impressions he would have received had he directly observed the scene Later Ehrlich summarises the nature of legal photography thus: Legal photographs are made for the purpose of ultimate use in a courtroom, ded by Photographs for use in litigation, lawyers and_ photo. ‘rat least to be exhibited them, tn maki people who are ta be informed or pers wrs should strive for “legal quality’, a term used here 0 describe Photographs having certain charackerstics of objectivity and accuracy, + Sortie as ts possible, phor aphs should show the matter depicted in a neutral, straightforward way. The photographer should be cautioned against Producing, dramatic effects; any drama in the picture should emanat the subject matter alone, and not from affected photographic techniques, such as unusual camera angles, printing vasiations, cropping and the like, Any such attempt to dramatise photographs may result in their exclusion and 8 consequent suspicion on the part of the jurors chat the patty offering such Photographs cannot be trusted. Therefore, commercial photographers who are nor experienced in legal work should be impressed with the importance of a neutral approach when making photographs for courtroom use aphs should dis pense with the elements of imagination and aristy, bu only that he should strive for accuracy rather than effect. Indeed, adv This is not to say that photographers making photogs ied techniques, ann! the use of very spevialised and delicate equipment, are often necessary in order to produce phorographs that are fair and accurate representations of the matters they depict There are courtroom advantages to be gained from photographs that appear t© have heen professionally made. Compared with amateur mal photographs have an aura of objec- Fivity and purposefulness, and itis less likely that there will be anything in their appearance to divert the attention of viewers from the matter depict ‘On the other hand, there ate inst Wes in which counsel must we photographs of amateurish appearance simply because they ate the best, or he only, pictures available. Furthermore, counsel should avoid obtainingnifier seems to become transparent so that the concept app present itself, and the arbitrary sign is naturalised by a spurious alent berween reference and which summons up the power of the real: a reality of the intertext bevond which there is no-sense, What lies ‘behind! the paper or ‘behind? the image s not reality ~ the referent — hut rete through which realism is enmeshed in a complex fabric of notions, rep. jon which func tion as everyday know-how, ‘practical ideology", norms within and through which people live their relation ro che world. [. . «| It is corpus of knowle social knowledge, thar is called upon through the mechanism of conno: sense its solidity We are not dealing here with a process oF signification which is ted” and which is historically changing," Its origins take us back to tha | me period in which Foucault traced institutions: the ‘disciplinary archipelago’. \ crucial part of the attempt of nineteenth centuries was the creati a1 institutions of language: in England, for example, the Royal Society with its ‘scientific’ philosophy « nguage, as well as the institarions of journalism and literature.” Ie was across such institutions that the realist convention was installed and cease to he visible as convention, becoming natural ~ ide with realty. A of discourse was established whose absolute value was that of reality itself. The dominant discourse attained this through thy creation of an identity between signifier and signified. All other discourse point of origin in the Real | The documentary mode held in such esteem by certain sections of the left ~ call it “real reportage” or what you will ~ is already implicated in che historically developed techniques of observation because it remains imprisoned within an histTe dckumet in his section] in Both an intron to and 4 bigs compres Giron of that nade at greater feng in [Taga shapers vehch fallen Fos eae {cage wos of phorography andthe Ibwor proses, se Allan Schule, “oc fyhecen Iahour and capa’ im B. HD BucMoh and, Wilkes eta eae Sheers and Orr Pictures 1948-1968 (HalilanlCape Becton, Nove Seni ee Sco Calle of Ar and Design, 1983) lextracted in Chapter 12 ahah M. Foucault, Power and sex: an interview with Michel Fenealt p Wp t A. Gramnci Star ana ci soviery an Q. Hoare and G, NomellSnth fei 5 ri the Pron Notebooks. London, Lawrence and Whe 1, Sn tent in Lenin and Poop and Other Ess, tams B Brest dowel ee ‘eft Books, 1971), p. 139 fextactd in Chapter 19 of the caleen Tid po 86, M. Foucault, Discipline and Prnishe The Barth of the Prom, AL Shee yiandons Allen Lane, 1977), pp. 26, 213-14, and ‘Pose tlhe ay inert Mich! Foucault. Radical Phibnopby, Ve oping 1977 J.B Sovith, qed in EP. Thonmpaon, The Mang of the Fg. Work (armondswordh, Peng idk p. 89. See also Cx Wepe-Promet, The P Nips. Crime and Authority in Victoneon Enc London, Croom Heli, 19°9). ch. H.W. Diamond, On the application Photography to che pysegnomic and mental Phenomena of nsanity’sinS- Gilman ed, The Fc nf Manes, lag W. Pr an the Ongin of Psychiatric Photography (Secaucus, Brome: Moat Shae Pract TM her was summared the Steriay Revaes? [24 Mos TRL Damon “Application of photography’ p24 Tah 20 The Lancet, 22 January 185% p89, quoted nS. 1. Gian, Hh W. ramon an pevehiatie photography, in Gilman fe). The Pace of Madcon Diamond “Appiciton of photography go lhad 19, Td. pp 20-4, Ibid. pp. 23-4 Tie Photographic journal. 3 (1887), p. 249, quit in Gilman fe, The Face Madness pe 9 H.W. Berend, “Uber dhe Benttung de Lichthlder for He Wein, med. Wischr, § (18551, p. 291 Keller, New York Medical journal, 59 (1884), p.7R8, See low R. Oh Mecha lustratin in dhe pas’ in FE Linwen te Moon London, 1971 raphy an Practice Quoted in Vs Loyd and G. Wager, The Camena and Br Bar pi Ibi (On the Panopecon, sce Foucault, Disipin nde (ert, 1974 ine and Punish, wp. 28, 134, 285 00-9, aad Focal, “Th Foucault, Duscip hid. pp 191-2 John Thomson, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, travelled exte Fa Eat, publishing four volumes of Hluattins of China andits Peopleritot dy an Adoiphe Smith he coauthored Street Life iv Londom, which appecins instalments from Febuary 1877. Thomas Annan pe cagraphed in and around Glaogon: betreen 1867 and 1877 for the Glasgow City Improvement Trost, publishes He