![]() ![]() ![]() Detached from the subject matter, the viewer is left to make connections in the photographs’ formal elements. The signified in Bertillon’s images is lost, leaving only the signifier. Due the way they have been photographed, the ears begin to lose their original context and revert to formal elements of line and shape. Bertillion devotes a number of plates in Identification Anthropométrique to photographs of the ears of incarcerated criminals, which become particularly interesting in their multiplicity. Through the compilation of thousands of photographs, Bertillon creates not only an archive to identify specific criminals but depicts the criminal body itself. It is this precarious trust in photography that many institutions capitalize on – by accepting photographs as transcriptions of the Real, viewers are force fed certain beliefs and ideologies. Context is also crucial to consider, as it can change the way one reads a photograph. The photographer actively chooses an image to enlarge and the viewer does not see the rest of the negatives, which could tell a vastly different story. Furthermore, selecting an image to print is an editing process. Photographers make a number of choices when creating a photograph that ultimately affect the viewer’s reading lens choice, composition, angle, dodging and burning, and many others are all conscious decisions. Walden argues that mentation is a factor in the photographic process. It would be naïve, however, to view the relationship between photography and truth as this straightforward.Ĭonsidering the number of ways the photographer is involved in the final image, it becomes clear that photography is subjective rather than objective. The visual similarity of photography to reality also contributes to its verisimilitude. This belief is in accordance with the post-industrialization trust in the machine notably, photography itself came into being at the time of the Industrial Revolution. ![]() Scott Walden suggests that the camera’s mechanistic etiology may be the rationale for the belief in photographic truth. Unlike painters, who must first cognitively register the scene, photographers’ mentation is somewhat excluded. The belief in its objective transcription of reality has led it to become essential to a number of institutions: medical science, police records, government identification, and journalism are all dependent on photography’s ability to convey truth, or so is commonly understood. Photography holds a privileged position in modern society. With these analyses in mind, photography can no longer be considered a neutral medium it is irrefutably political, tied to specific ideologies, and imbued with power dynamics. The inclusion of a still life by Jerry Sarapochiello in the Union Carbide Corporation’s 1984 report is striking to the author because it forgoes depictions of a disaster at a plant earlier that year in favor of an aestheticization of the company’s products. For Squiers, photography plays a specific role in corporation’s annual reports, aiding in the focus on or away from specific issues. Krauss analyzes Irving Penn’s Clinique ad from 1981 and how it creates a simulacrum, a false reality, in order to sell the product. Looking at Identification Anthropométrique (1893) by Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton’s Criminal Composites (1878), Sekula sees photography as an epistemological tool that 19th century pseudoscience used to create the supposititious image of the criminal. They take differing approaches in looking at this concept, however, as well as look at a diverse selection of work from different periods of time. The theorists Allan Sekula, Rosalind Krauss, and Carol Squiers each look at the role of photography in modern society and how the institutions of criminology, advertising, and corporate public relations, respectively, employ photography to advance their own interests. By utilizing photographic imagery, those in power manipulate the Real and capitalize on the medium’s supposed truth value.
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