Chapter 2 investigates the classification and identification of bodies along the lines of race, gender, and citizenship. Photography – as one of the indexical modalities of the visual (fingerprinting being the other one) – was an important domain in which citizens and subjects negotiated state-imposed epistemologies of the body. The chapter draws on two theoretical propositions in order to frame the discussion: Roberto Esposito’s dispositif of the person and Thomas Lemke’s expanded understanding of Foucault’s notion of governmentality that considers the multiple conjunctions between bodies and things . Using a vast archive of identity documents, travel certificates, permits, labour recruitment passes, and passports produced between the 1920s and 1960s, the chapter explores how photographs were harnessed for classification and typology, reification, and abstraction. The issuing of identity documents, and in the South African context the enforcement of the dompas system, are usually understood within the domain of state action that often-produced repressive visual forms. Still, even in the domain of bureaucratic registration, we find a remarkable diversity in aesthetic language and visual practice that made space for African agencies, self-articulations, and critiques of the hegemonic claims enforced by racial projects under segregation and apartheid.