ABSTRACT
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. Rather, social power operates by virtue of a positive therapeutic or reformative channeling of the body. In the mid-nineteenth century, the terms of linkage between the sphere of culture and that of social regulation were specifically utilitarian. Many of the early promoters of photography struck up a Benthamite chorus, stressing the medium’s promise for a social calculus of pleasure and discipline. In the United States, similar but more extensive utilitarian claims were made by the portrait photographer Marcus Aurelius Root, who was able to articulate the connection between pleasure and discipline, to argue explicitly for a moral economy of the image. Like Carlyle, he stressed the salutory effects of photography on working-class family life.
