The Body and the Archive *

Abstract

The sheer range and volume of photographic practice offers ample evidence of the paradoxical status of photography within bourgeois culture. Initially, photography threatens to overwhelm the citadels of high culture. The anonymous lyricist voiced sentiments that were also heard in the higher chambers of the new culture of photography. The protean oral “texts” of the criminal and pauper yield to a “mute testimony” that “takes down” and unmasks the disguises, the alibis, the excuses and multiple biographies of those who find or place themselves on the wrong side of the law. Michel Foucault has argued, quite crucially, that it is a mistake to describe the new regulatory sciences directed at the body in the early nineteenth century as exercises in a wholly negative, repressive power. The clearest indication of the essential unity of this archive of images of the body lies in the fact that by the mid-nineteenth century a single hermeneutic paradigm had gained widespread prestige.

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