![]() ![]() Nancy Burson, Mankind (Oriental, Caucasian, and Black, weighted according to current population statistics), 1983–85 Others, that opposed the archival paradigm were Augene Atget (1857-1927), who photographed like the police (daily life crime scenes) but to show the squalid conditions people lived in, and Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975), that developed work in dialogue with police uses of photography (see the Subway photographs) but opposed the bureaucratic structure of the photo archive with a more poetic approach (see the 1938 American Photos) Amongst the modernists, he mentions August Sanders (author of the 1925-27 book: People of the 20th Century), as an attempt to show universal social and professional classes ( its chapters include: The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The Last People). These two attitudes are identified by Sekula in documentary photographers, in their photographic relation to realism. In spite of his inability to identity a recognisable criminal type, Galton attempted to distance photography from its indexical relationship with the real, elevating it to the order of the symbolic, more than a trace of the individual to get to the generalised order of the abstraction.Īugust Sander, Secretary at West German Radio, Cologne, 1931 Galton on the other hand, develop the method of composite portraiture, which consisted in combine through repeated limited exposure (working with the negatives in a specially prepared apparatus) the faces of a number of individuals sharing similar characteristics (criminality, illness, race, etc), in order to arrive at the average type. He remained grounded in the indexical order of photography> the photo of the criminal remained the trace of its referent. Bertillon and Galton, represented two attempts to regulate social deviance by means of photography.īertillon developed a nominalist system of identification, which included anthopometry,a system of recognition based on body measurements ( of 11 body areas), alongside photography (front and profile) and textual description (of distinguishink body marks) and to deal with the enormous amount of data thusobtained from the population, invented as well the first rigorous system of archival cataloguing and retrieval of photographs. The archival paradigm is represented by the work of Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914) and Francis Galton (English, 1822-1911), two pioneers of early scientific policing that developed the concepts and tools that allowed the growth of the generalised practice of the bureaucratic handling of visual documents. ![]() In the end of the essay, Sekula pushes his argument further to place current photographers practices within this tradition, distinguishing between photographers that embrace the archival paradigm and those that oppose it. This is the context of two parallel emerging sciences- physiognomy (study of the facial characters as an insight into the person’s personality) and phrenology (study of the head’s regions as a clue to the person’s criminality) that aimed at helping the police identify the criminals. In order to present his argument that there is a close connection between the archival paradigm and the operations of power that regulate “the deviant body” (and consequently, “the social body”), Sekula places the emergence of photography in the context of the development of police acts and technologies of surveillance He goes back to the mid 19th century, to study the development of photography (Daguerre’s daguerreotype dating from 1839) to discuss the paradoxical status of photography, both as the promise of honorific portraiture made available to the lower classes but also as a tool capable of identifying them to the police. Photographic works to search for: Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, August Sander, Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Nancy Burson, Martha Rosler What is the importance of placing a photographer’s documentary realism within a compliance with the archival paradigm or as a challenge to it? What is the relevance of Sekula’s text for photographers working with archives? (ed.) The contest of meaning: critical histories of photography, Cambridge: MIT Press. (1992) The body and the archive, in Bolton, R.
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