For this post i have decided to analyse a text that that has been recommended to me by one of my lecturers for the theme of identity.Jon Tagg is the Author of a book entitled; ‘The Burden of Representation’. And the chapter i am focusing on is ‘The portrait as a means of surveillance‘.After reading the chapter, i found it very helpful in contextualising my work, and linking it to historical development of the portrait as a means of surveillance, and the effects that it has. Tagg makes continuous reference to the writings of the french historian Foucault, who studied the economic infastructures’ powers at play within govermental institutions, which is completely ingrained into the subject that Tagg is writing about.
Firstly, Tagg goes into detail as to how photography not only developed with the introduction of the police service, but was instrumental in their devlopment and relationship together for over two hundred years,
‘The value of photographs by the police was realised at a very early stage. Though successful portraiture only became possible with the introduction of faster petzval lenses and more sensitive daguerreotype processes by 1841, the police employed civilian photographers from the 1840’s onwards’
This not only explains how the police utilised the latest photographic processes, but also how they used it as a tool from the beginning. Tagg goes on to describe how the photographers who they hired were firstly used to create early mugshots of suspects, but also to photograph fingerprints.
What i found particularly interesting was a point that Tagg makes about what the criminal portrait does,
‘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 disciplinary method:the body made object; divided and studied;inclosed in a cellular structure of space whose architecture is the file-index; made docile and forced to yield up its truth;separated and individuated;subjected and made subject. When accumulated, such images amount to a new representation of society’
What is being said here by Tagg that it is this act of cataloguing that it invites study and subjects them and invites study when grouped together and objectifies the sitters when viewed individually. They are also used as complete evidence in a numerous amount of ways, and is standard practice for the police to use photographs for court evidence.
But Tagg develops his point of how photography has been used as a tool of control by not just the police, but by nearly every governmental institution of governmentally structures society, such as schools, hospitals, asylums, army and many more.
In 1856, Dr Hugh Welch Diamond saw photography and the use of the Portrait as evidence and record in physiognomic analysis. Dr Hugh Welch Diamond was the resident superintendant of the female department of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, as well as the founding member of the Royal Photographic society, and used the portrait process to photograph his patients and used it as an aid to his treatment. In regards to his use of the portraits, Dr Welch Diamond said
“The photographer secures with unerring accuracy the external phenomena of each passion, as the really certain indication of internal derangement, and exhibits to the eye the well-known sympathy that exists between the diseased brain and the organs and features of the body”
(images © Dr Hugh Welch Diamond)
So Dr Welch Diamond saw the portrait as encapsulating something about his patients that could be catalogued and analysed to show proof or explanation to their mental illness. The reason why it was most likely regarded as such infallible evidence to such claims as Dr Welch Diamond was describing above was most likely due to its connection with science with its scientific development process, Tagg writes,
‘The value of the camera was extolled because the optical and chemical processes of photography were taken to designate a scientifically exploited but ‘natural’ mechanism producing ‘natural’ images whose truth was guaranteed Photography presented ‘a perfect and faithful record.’
So from were photography was implemented, it was ingrained into the institutions it was used as evidence for. The essay continues to show examples of how the photographic portrait was used in other institutions. It was used as a systematic record of children as the entered and left halfway houses institutions and was key in tracing the children back to homes or finding them if found guilty of criminal acts, for example Thomas John Barnardo opened a ‘home for destitute lads’ in 1874 were this method of cataloguing the children was implemented. But it was his methods that brought him to a court of law in 1877, and Tagg inserted what he was charged with’
‘The system of taking, and making capital of, the children’s photographs is not only dishonest but has a tendency to destroy the better feelings of the children… He is not satisfied with taking them as they really are, but he tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they really are. They are also taken in purely fictitious positions’
(above are two examples of the fictitious poses that the children are placed in, in order to show a greater gap between the before and after)
And the court ruled the images to be ‘artistic fiction’. This is a great example of not only the power the photographer has over the subject, but also how the sitter can be manipulated to say what the photographer wants to be displayed at that given moment.
Tagg also notes the composition pattern in these types of institutional photographs,
‘the body isolated, the narrow space;the subjection to an unreturnable gaze; scrutiny of gestures, faces and features; the clarity of illumination and sharpness and focus;names and number board. these are the traces of power, repeated countless times, whenever the photographer prepared and exposure, in police cell, prison, consultation room, asylum, home or school.’
Tagg clearly lists the different institutions that have this ingrained used of the photographic portrait as proof of identifying people in the public, and how it is the composure that is the ‘ trace of power’. Something that was discussed in a previous essay i analysed, was the panopticon design by Jeremy Bentham, were basically a architectural design where the view of someone could always be seen by another.
So in conclusion, It is clearly evident through the numerous examples that were offered by Tagg, that the portrait as a means of surveillance can be used to portray a different perspective, or lie about a persons identity, but also how it is used as an ingrained tool within all institutions as a tool for systematic control over the populace. By allowing the individual to be catalogued in this way, it can be completely dehumanising. I can see how this relates to my portraiture work, because i am taking a contemporary approach to how this format is used as a means of surveillance and power, and i am interested in playing with the power that is in play, between the viewer, sitter and photographer.
references:
Tagg, J (1988). The Burden of Representation. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. p60-102.
Contemporary Themes 