Photography as a tool for social control. Anything related to formal photography somehow is subject to the institutional and historical gaze. John Tagg commented, ‘Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own. …. This is not the power of the camera but the power of the apparatuses of the local state which deploy it and guarantee authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or register a truth.’
Alphonse Bertillon started judicial model showing criminal’s frontal and profile view in 1912. “For Bertillon, the criminal body expressed nothing. No characterological secrets were hidden beneath the surface of this body. Rather, the surface and the skeleton were indices of a more strictly material sort. The anthropometrical signalment was the register of the morphological constancy of the adult skeleton, thus the key to biographical identity. Likewise, scars and other deformations of the flesh were clues, not to any propensity for crime, but to the body’s physical history: its trades, occupations and calamities.” Commented by Alan Sekula.
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