ABSTRACT
This chapter examines moments when photographic representations of the body either seek to control and surveil—as with the Bertillon identification card, or conversely when they challenge such purposes—as with Antin’s CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture or Sekula’s portraits. In 1986, about fifteen years after Antin produced CARVING, artist and writer Allan Sekula wrote an essay entitled “The Body and the Archive,” in which he describes the way photography, since its inception, has been used as just such an agent of control and tool for social categorization. In the nineteenth century, ethnographic photographs of colonized people functioned as tools of surveillance, classification, and control. In the nineteenth century, ethnographic and anthropometric photography was part of the Western colonial project; it provided a way for Europeans to observe, measure, and assert control over bodies they perceived as different from and inferior to their own.
