Victorian Visual Culture

The idea of police departments utilizing photographs to document who they book and who their inmates are sounds like an idea worth exploring, until you get to the more technical questions. What information should be included when processing these people? The shift from the wealthy only being able to have their portraits painted to photography being used to capture the essence of a criminal became a tool of classification and control of the human body in policing. Allan Sekula, author of The Body and The Archive, unpacks the inconsistencies of Bertillon’s thought of individualism as only a statistic, not something to be seen as humane, though Bertillon believed it to be so. Through ironic juxtaposition, Sekula reveals Bertillon’s impulse to classify individualism and how that turns into viewing the individual as not human, but as a mere statistic from a metaphysical standpoint, and how truly harmful that turns out to be. I argue how Bertillon’s method is especially dangerous in terms of racial identity. Policing and photography was something that I did not think about much until this class. The shift from the privileged and wealthy only being able to have their portraits painted all the way to photography being used to capture the essence of a criminal became a tool of classification and control of the human body. The creation of the Bertillon Card/Bertillonage can be slightly attributed to creating the modern way of identification for inmates, but it is worth noting that the Bertillon card was a huge failure. Sekula does a remarkable job pointing out the irony of Bertillon’s argument on why his methods of identification could work. Looking at it through my body, I believe that this method would have especially been dangerous to people of color. Bertillon suggested that his method was for the good of the people, that surveillance was a good thing, but has historically been used against marginalized communities. In my midterm, I looked at a card assigned to a well-dressed, well-groomed Mexican man and thought of how the card could have been misused to identify Mexican-Americans in the future. From the Zoot-suit riots to the Chicano movement, a multitude of Mexican-Americans were obviously arrested, and this card would hold only unnecessary information to stereotype a Mexican person to arrest more in the future which similar attributes. Though the Bertillon card no longer exists, the stereotyping of this marginalized group around the country is absolutely more dangerous than what the card itself could have done.