ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, photography historians and theorists suggested that the new interest in the body in photography was linked to the emergence of new critical theories and ‘body politics’. Today, the technological transformation of bodies, and the role of photography in that transformation, needs to be understood as both the physical manipulation of human and animal bodies and also the translation of the body into data, which accelerated in proportion to the perceived security risks and tightened border controls of the so-called ‘war on terror’ initiated by the United States after the September 11 attacks in 2001. By the end of the nineteenth century, photography was being used to classify people into ‘types’, illustrating and extending the Victorian sciences of phrenology and physiognomy. One significant legacy of the nineteenth-century disciplinary uses of photography is in contemporary biometric data systems that deploy digital photographs, iris scans and, most commonly, fingerprinting.
