from “Readings of the Invisible: Notes on the Scientific Applications of Photography at the End of the Nineteenth Century”
The concept of “representative features” that was central to ethnographic concerns at the end of the nineteenth century also played an important role in medicine and criminology. In these different fields photography served to visualize differences—racial, pathological, or criminal—that indicated a degeneration of normality. The most extreme illustration of this concept was furnished in 1876 by Cesare Lombroso, who used photography to prove the existence of “criminal,” “morally deranged,” or “epileptic” types. In this case, the proof did not rely on an act of superposition, as in the composite portrait; it was based on a horizontal layout of the prints, arranged to form a conspectus. This juxtaposition is also a kind of narration, however, for it demands that we read the photographs as sequences whose meaning is determined by the group as a whole. “What wonderful studies of physiognomy can be found in these collections, where the nature of the crime can be found inscribed on the countenance of the guilty! We could read the history of human passions in this book, where each face would be a page and every feature an eloquent line!” These comments by Ernest Lacan, written in 1856, seem to prefigure Lombroso’s experiments, whose picture-language initiates a readability, a narration through the serialization of photographs.
Experiments concerned with psychiatry evinced a similar desire to confine the spread of illness within a space where the sequence of the phases of degeneration could be clearly expressed. By joining a photography studio to his laboratory in 1878 (initially under the direction of D. M. Bourneville and Paul Regnard, then of Albert Londe), Jean-Martin Charcot attempted to produce the typical form of an attack of hysteria, until then considered to be essentially formless. A reading of hysteria as a succession of a given number of phases was thus elaborated through a serial arrangement of photographs. It is again the orchestration of a literary space that is responsible for imprinting the images with the movement of an enforced reading. By its position in the series and by the caption that explains it, each phase is indexed as a modification of the preceding step and anticipation of the next. So it is within the imaginary space-time that separates and binds the photographs that the form and history of the hysterical attack can be read.
Judicial photography, established as dogma by Alphonse Bertillon beginning in 1888, doesn’t attempt to produce a type, but rather to distinguish the identity of the individual criminal. It also implies a principle of relationship among photographs, however, based on which the imaginary can improve upon the transparency of the image. For the permanence of an individual’s traits can only be determined by comparing different identity photographs. But this juxtaposition, on the margin of identity, provokes the creation of a history of the simulacra, the phases of aging that have visibly deformed that identity. “The difference between the two prints that we have given as examples is adequately explained by a modification in the thoughts of the individual we are going to meet. When young Raoul was arrested for the first time…, this event disturbed him, and he scrupulously obeyed the directions of the photographer, who asked him to look at the lens. He was arrested for the second time in May 1885…during the intervening period, he frequented bad company and grew hardened, thinking it worthwhile to conceal himself under the false name of Billardo. So when the time came for the classic ‘Don’t move, please,’ rather than look at the lens, he looked at the photographer, laughing silently and saying to himself, ‘Go ahead! That’s just fine! This guy doesn’t even recognize me. This is the second time he’s taking my picture in six months.'” Commenting on the juxtaposition of images, Bertillon composed a story that included an imaginary reconstruction of the psychological conditions of the photographic session, as well as an interior monologue, to prove that photography could undo the lie of appearances and was, therefore, unquestionably effective for the police.
Translated by Robert Bononno (C) 1989.
Robert Bononno 