Looking with Conviction: Two Ways of Apprehending the Criminal in the Nineteenth Century
by Jordan Bear, Columbia University

Poeta tabulas cum cepit sibi,
Quaerit quod nusquam est gentium, reperit tamen.[1]

-Plautus Pseudolus

Writing in a manner representative of the social criticism of the 1870s, one British commentator asserted, with respect to a paramount concern of the era, that “we possess the power, and can remove the foul blot of habitual criminality, which to our discredit attaches to this country more than to any civilised state, by an improved administration which should no longer be delayed. For the time may arrive, when, having lost the thread of control through our laxity, any attempt at amendment may be found to be too late for its object.”[2] Indeed, the desire to hold tightly to this thread dominated the social and political discourse of an epoch in which new modes of control were sought to manage an increasingly volatile amalgam of marginal urban groups. This project, expressed most definitively by Michel Foucault in his Discipline and Punish, consisted of “methods for administering the accumulation of men [which] made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection.”[3] Some of the most engaging recent work on the history of photography in this era has identified the participation of the medium in the implementation of these technologies of power.[4] Yet, what has been effaced in this appealing dominant account is the story of photography’s incompatibility with this reconfiguration of power, of the ways in which the epistemological regimes attached to photographic practice failed as an adjunct to political desire. While the photographic archive developed by Alphonse Bertillon for the Paris police has been identified as the apotheosis of photography’s partnership with the investigative and surveillance prerogatives of the state, another mode of such observation has gone almost entirely unnoticed.

Beginning in the 1870s, the use of police artists became a staple in the investigative repertoire of most metropolitan police departments in Europe and in North America.[5] (Fig. 1). This technique operated within the context of a very different set of beliefs about the image and its relationship to the “improved administration” of the most dangerous among the many groups of concern to the state: the criminal. By examining the emergence of this alternative approach, we will be able to restore a central way in which the photograph was seen, in the nineteenth century, to be a far more problematical incarnation of the objectives of social control than prevailing critical notions suggest. The association of photography with empiricist methods of observation was, as I shall describe, often at odds with the larger social project in whose service photography was to be deployed. The presumption of the transparency of the medium was, in the arsenal of an increasingly intrusive state apparatus, a double-edged sword: while its unmediated status could be made to secure the evidentiary demands of power, the newly vital articulation of particularity invested in the photograph often precluded an appropriately expansive project of surveillance. In order to conduct our investigation, we need to locate these moments of ambivalence within an intellectual framework that underlies the very process of observation upon which this entire enterprise was predicated, namely, the perceptual.

The panoply of scientific and juridical contexts within which photography operated was adroitly articulated by one observer in 1873 when he asserted that

Medical men take photographs of diseased organs and tissues, as among the best modes of comparing one disease with another. Archaeologists photograph ancient marbles and inscriptions, ancient bronzes, and coins...civil engineers take photographs of broken bridges and embankments, and mechanical engineers of broken boilers and locomotives, that they may have before them a permanent record of each disaster...And now justice steps in to claim her share in the service which photography renders to mankind. She asserts that when a rogue has become well-nigh incorrigible, it is right that the officers of the law should have an eye upon him, and a clue whereby they may know him again when he again transgresses...to obtain a permanent means of knowing them again.[6]

Photography, accordingly, takes on the scientific authority already established by these emergent professionalized and specialized pursuits, and is declared a corresponding means of recording empirically observed data. It is essential to note in this catalogue the extent to which the utility of photography is located in its ability to serve as a record, but particularly as a record which can be employed in a comparative process of perceiving. The criminal alluded to in the final category above is subject to photographic representation by virtue of his status as an habitual offender, the knowledge of whose existence has been empirically certified and recorded photographically. This emphasis on recidivism in the discourse of criminal photography was a commonplace, and is concurrent with the development, legislation, and enforcement of the Habitual Criminals Act of 1869. This statute provided the impetus, in England, for the beginning of a national photographic archive to aid the country’s burgeoning professional police force. The comparative basis of these measures attests to the degree to which the specificity of the photographic image was deeply embedded in its conception, for the process of checking a known, secure image of an identifiable individual against its potential referent in the real world was the primary method of use.

Yet, certain episodes in the history of photography’s engagement with these scientific enterprises betray the incompatibility of the presumed specificity of the medium with the larger social projects in which they were employed. When Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin and the founder of the Eugenics movement, sought to demonstrate the efficacy of rationalized breeding, he turned to photography as a direct visual analogue for his undertaking. Galton’s composite portraits of the 1870s photographed several images of individuals–criminals, Jews, and members of other threatening and marginal groups–onto the same plate with a short exposure time, with the aim of extracting the typical physiognomic features common to the group.[7] Implicit in Galton’s blending was the belief that underlying each of these groups were certain facets which could only be rendered visible by removing–breeding out–the specificity associated with the single portraits. The photograph, in this project, was imagined to offer too much particularity for the objectives at hand, for it was only through aggressive intervention upon these seemingly unmediated records of reality that they could be made to serve a biological and social program whose demands were fundamentally typological.

The mitigation of the particular in Galton’s work is fairly well-known, and his composite portrait of the criminal has been widely reproduced. The recipient of less attention, however, is another composite portrait which appeared in the same initial publication of Galton’s results in 1879. On the same page as the composites which purported to derive the essential criminal type were a series of the “likenesses of six different Roman ladies and the composite of them in the centre.” (Fig. 2). The rather odd feature to be noted here is that these are photographs of coins which depict these women of antiquity, and not photographs of actual women. What was Galton’s aim in including this array, and why was it juxtaposed with the criminal portraits whose support of the Eugenics agenda seems so much clearer? In order to grasp fully what is at work here, it seems essential to point out that this very unusual juxtaposition makes reference to a particular trope of nineteenth-century art theory which would have been far more accessible to the initial viewers of Galton’s work, and to consider the set of debates into which this allusion introduces these images.

The women of classical antiquity blended together to create one central composite image would have been evocative, in 1879, of the activity of another, ancient, artist, the Greek painter Zeuxis, one of whose signal achievements was to have combined the features of five beautiful women to create his iconic portrait of Helen of Troy, as related in Pliny’s Natural History. This particular parable was, by the moment of Galton’s images, already an established site of contention, for it embodied ably the conviction of many theorists that the great artistic genius would never simply represent that which could be apprehended by his senses, but rather that his invention would derive from an expansive field of sources that reached beyond the visible. Among the most influential theorists of nineteenth century fine arts, Quatremere de Quincy, asserted, not uniquely, that works of art “are not the images of any object that can be called real, since it is formed by the study of the artist, and is manifested in his productions, by the aid of an aggregate of ideas, forms, relations, and perfections, that no reality could furnish united in a single being,–a single subject.”[8] Crucially, this operation is nearly invariably proposed as an action antithetical to looking since “whatever comes within the scope of the understanding, of sentiment, and of genius, does not really exist any where, has neither substance nor place, and is subjected to no one of the senses; he who finds it is unable to point out where he has seen the model of it.”[9] Quatremere’s unempirical truth, of “a verisimilitude found nowhere in nature,” might be said to resemble Galton’s approach in both its commitment to a composite notion of verity, and its rejection of the visual observation of a single entity as providing the most veridical access to this truth. That Galton would have reiterated photographically the project of Zeuxis indicates the theoretical account upon which his “breeding” seems predicated: that only by selectively refining the particularities of the observed world to a common schema can any kind of meaningful accuracy be achieved.

Precisely this ability to apprehend a verisimilitude beyond the senses was one which had experienced a long period of refinement within the realm of aesthetic debate, and had culminated in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s assertions in his Discourses on Art that the artist trained in the academic tradition is uniquely well-situated, “his eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies and deformities of things from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original.”[10] This view had been anticipated by Shaftesbury who, like Reynolds, sought to denigrate the perceptual basis of aesthetic judgment and the egalitarian possibilities of subjectivity that it implied. Shaftesbury had asserted that “the man of breeding has an inward eye that distinguishes, and sees the fair and shapely apart from the deformed, foul, odious, and despicable.”[11] This claim remarkably prefigures the idiom within which Galton’s project would operate, conflating the cultural and the genetic properties not only of artistic creation, but of aesthetic taste, disparaging the perceptual at the expense of a form of looking reserved for the rather ambiguously “cultivated,” and socially superior, eye. The demographic and cultural chaos that occurred when access to the milieux of visuality was granted too generously was announced by an observer in 1760, the year of the first British exhibition:

as every member of the [Strand Society for the Encouragement of Arts] was at liberty to distribute what number of tickets for admittance he thought fit, that which was intended only as a polite, entertaining and rational amusement for the publick, became a scene of tumult and disorder.[12]

If, as one scholar has recently argued of Eighteenth-Century Britain, “in becoming a viewer one not only stakes a claim to be able to ‘see’ the objects of cultural regard, one also makes a bid for entry into the domain of the visible...[as] a citizen in the demos of taste,”[13] the rejection of the perceptual as a valid route to aesthetic and cultural enfranchisement would have been a far more efficient strategy for organizing a scene of “tumult and disorder” than merely limiting the number of tickets for sale or increasing their asking price.

The fundamental antagonism, in Galton’s work and in the theoretical conversation in which it is embedded, between a corporeally situated empiricism available to even the most ribald and unsavory members of the “publick,” and an intellectually rooted a priori process, brings us back directly to that group of individuals with which Galton was initially concerned: the criminal. The larger fabric of political projects at work in the late nineteenth century, in which Galton imagined Eugenics to be the most instrumental thread, was deeply invested in this opposition, and likewise found the photograph to be superficially satisfying, but ultimately restrictive. One contemporary of Galton’s asserted that

The weak point in criminal anthropology, it seems to me, is that while criminals have been weighed and measured, observed and described, the classes of society from which most of them come, but who have not been convicted of breaking the law, have not been observed in the same way, and the same scientific tests have not been applied to them...it seems clear that a scientific criminal anthropology which is to cover the whole ground must deal with the idle, the vagrant, the pauper, the prostitute, the drunkard, the imbecile, the epileptic, and the insane, as well as the criminal.[14]

The focus of the empirical repertoire, of which the photograph was emblematic, on the particular recidivist, and its failure to encompass more broadly and in a preventative manner the dangers residing in the threatening classes, seemed a shortcoming precisely because it circumscribed the field of visual monitoring. The photograph is–in its imagined status as being free from artistic mediation–not well suited to this particular task, for it is only by a kind of combination of the individual views that anything like the profound truth of Zeuxis’s Helen is attained. The particularity invested in the medium inhibits Galton’s work in a way that is precisely indicated by the allusions which are compelled by his selection of experimental subjects. The typological efficacy of the photograph is thus paradoxically undermined by the contemporary belief in its unmediated ability to capture the idiosyncratic and the distinct. It is as a product of this historical moment that the police sketch emerges, an era in which the perceptual and political apprehension of the criminal required more than the mere matching of the past offender to the archive.

Although a far less technologically advanced medium than the photograph, the police sketch had a distinct advantage in one crucial respect: the generation of an image of a criminal of unknown identity expanded the subject of investigative image-making to encompass the entire marginal population announced in the anthropologist’s complaint. In a way that the photograph’s presumed specificity precluded, the fact that the police sketch could only be refined to a certain level of particularity implicated a far vaster range of suspects in the crime in question. All those who matched the general description of the sketch were questionable, implicitly placing under suspicion and concomitant surveillance an entirely new group of individuals, all of whom had nothing to do with the crime–all but one, of course. This shift in procedure, which has been poorly served by the voluminous bibliography of the history of surveillance photography, seems to me a crucial moment in the relationship of images to political authoritarianism. The image-aided search for an identified, known, and previously convicted criminal was replaced by a far more expansive hunt not for an individual per se, but for all those who satisfied typologically the account provided by the police sketch. Indeed, with the aid of the police sketch, the “usual suspects” could be rounded up with markedly increased justification.

The presumed efficacy of this kind of typological inquiry was unquestionably nurtured by the same climate in which Galton’s project flourished. Central to this milieu was the development of physiognomy, which had been developed by the Swiss Lavater in the later eighteenth century and which sought to demonstrate correlations between interior dispositions and characteristic physical manifestations. In his influential study, Lavater proposed physiognomy as “the Science of discovering the relation between the exterior and the interior–between the visible surface and the invisible spirit which it covers,” and was predicated upon the “Harmony between Moral Beauty and Physical Beauty.”[15] (Fig. 3). Criminals, in the tradition of which Lavater is an exemplar, can be identified by their corporeal manifestations of “criminal” physical traits. Like the police sketch, the typological nature of Galton’s study expanded the demographic of those who could be reasonably monitored–and thus scrutinized as possible criminals–and perpetuated the correlations proposed by Lavater.

But what was unique about the introduction of the composite police sketch was the way in which it reified this entire typological tradition of surveillance into a set of practices which imposed a political will upon the perceptual realm. In these portraits–for that is the genre to which they bear the most affinities–the police artist, as an extension of the state apparatus of criminal investigation, mediates between what is seen and what is represented. The agency of the psychological process of representation is ceded, by proxy, to the skilled hand of another party: the hybrid police-artist. The desire to manage the unwieldy urban populace, which operated under the authority of physiognomy and related flights of pseudoscientific fancy, was inculcated into the process by which vision is translated into a figurative image. The surrender of this operation to an image-maker whose ultimate task was to render a representation which would grant the greatest license to the apparatus of which he was a part is consistent with the larger denigration of perception and its apprehension of the specific we noted in the Zeuxis metaphor. Here, the assimilation of the recollection of the witness to a typological template mandated the removal of the particular, but in a far more insidious way than in Galton’s project. Now, this entire enterprise was exercised upon the body of that witness, upon his agency in the expression of that which was apprehended by his sensorium: by the substitution of the state’s apparatus of looking for his own.

The imposition of the political directly upon the perceptual, and its mediation between vision and representation, ultimately helped to codify and instrumentalize the unwieldy morass of typological theory into a kind of cognitive schema, invalidating observation of the individualized person to further an ordered system. Indeed, these schemata, and their objective of getting hold of the flux of experience, are central to the maintenance of such a system, whether perceptual or political. In the influential account of a central but currently somewhat unfashionable figure in twentieth century art theory, Ernst Gombrich, pictorial representation is always filtered through templates that are formed by cultural traditions and which act as “a selective screen which admits only the features for which schemata exist.”[16] The formation of these schemata is dependent upon the visual and cultural context from which they derive and, consequently, the departures they compel in representation relate specifically to the incongruities between these contexts and the subject of representation. In Gombrich’s account, then, representation is bound inextricably to the traditions of the artist’s historical subjecthood, as “the familiar will always remain the likely starting point for the rendering of the unfamiliar.” When Gombrich sought, in the concluding sections of Art and Illusion, to locate a metaphor for his conception of the psychology of pictorial representation, he found it in what will be, by now, a familiar site:

Police sometimes employ draftsmen to aid witnesses in the identification of criminals. They may draw any vague figure, a random schema, and let witnesses guide their modifications of selected features simply by saying ‘yes,’ or ‘no’ to various suggested standard alterations...this account of portrait drawing by remote control may well be over-tidy, but as a parable it may serve its purpose. It reminds us that the starting point of a visual record is not knowledge but a guess conditioned by habit and tradition.[17]

The police sketch was thus figured as a venue in which the inescapability of preexisting representational manifestations of a political power exerted its force, for in such a medium, the observation of the “real” criminal would always be overpowered by the typological account which served to sustain the power of the investigative authority. This tool, for Gombrich, both metaphorizes the cognitive process which produces representation, and serves as a metonymic reminder of an analogous system through which the schemata of this culture–of “the modern police state”–are erected.

The “starting point” and subsequent modification of both perceptual and representational convention in Gombrich’s account should remind us again of the articulation of painterly principles that cast a long shadow over the nineteenth century, Reynolds’s Discourses, in which “an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form” of an object, from which all subsequent representations must derive. Indeed, Gombrich asserted that, in the human face, “there is some general dominant expression of which the individual expressions are merely modifications.”[18] This central form was certainly, in the most important sense, a dominant one in the construction of a typological scopic regime of modernity, in which modification displaced innovation. In his study of the history of clinical medicine, The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem argued that a reconceptualization of disease by Auguste Comte in the first half of the nineteenth century cast the pathological–deviation–as being “merely a quantitative modification of the normal state.” The vast realm of disturbances to which the human body was subjected were no longer qualitatively distinct from the normal, but simply a diminution or augmentation of the normal itself. “By stating in a general way that diseases do not change vital phenomena,” Canguilhem brilliantly asserts, “Comte is justified in stating that the cure for political crises consists in bringing societies back to their essential and permanent structure, and tolerating progress only within limits of variation of the natural order defined by social statics.”[19] If the model of vision and image-making embodied in the proliferation of the police sketch imposes itself by rejecting the specificity of perceptual experience in order to stabilize a typological organization of society, this development in the conception of the normal and deviant bodily forms a useful counterpart. To limit the representational possibilities of the human face by mandating, as this medium does, that any image must act as merely an acceptable deviation from a central type, is to reinstate, at the deprivation of aesthetic and corporeal autonomy, precisely the equilibrium that oppositional imagery historically sought to disrupt.

The proliferation of this medium seems to respond quite specifically to the concerns of the criminal anthropologist, whose aims echoed those of a particularly malevolent political entity, for it is precisely in the service of this apparatus that photography seemed, by dint of its presumed transparency, too empirically neutral for the expansive array of practices in which it was enlisted. The authority conferred upon the photograph had become so embedded in its general epistemological conception that its utility in a program whose aim was far more ambitious than the mere control of a single individual, became dubious. Situated as it was, in the midst of a central nineteenth century debate about practices of image-making, the privileged position of photography in the immediate rendering of observed reality could easily be discredited on the basis of a comprehensive denigration of the perceptual, its concomitant inability to access anything but surface truths, and its divorcement from Quatremere’s “verisimilitude found nowhere in nature.” The police sketch, and its insinuation of the political into the corporeal realm, ensured the perpetuation of a desired typological construction of the world, a system by which the very agency of the citizen to see and to represent was subsumed to the state’s own kind of panoptic desires. In a program of surveillance in which photography constituted an inadequately expansive kind of empirical basis, an alternative political technology of the body emerged, and initiated a visual realm in which looking was always already a matter of conviction.

Endnotes

1. “[But as the] poet, with his tablets in hand, seeks for what nowhere is, yet finds it [makes a lie seem true.]”

2. Walter Crofton, “Supervision of Habitual Criminals,” in Good Words XVI (1875) 637.

3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1978) 200-1.

4. Especially John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” October 39 (Winter 1986) 3-64.

5. Karen T. Taylor, Forensic Art and Illustration (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2001) 12-15.

6. Anon., “Criminal Photography,” in All the Year Round XI (1873-4) 10.

7. David Green, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics,” in Oxford Art Journal 7:2 (1985) 11.

8. Quatremere de Quincy, “On the End of Imitation in the Fine Arts,” (1823) reprinted and trans. Joshua C. Taylor, Nineteenth Century Theories of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 99.

9. My emphasis.

10. Quincy, p. 98.

11. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1959) 46.

12. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. Tolus M. Robertson (London, 1900) 136.

13. John Gwynn, London and Westminster Improv’d, quoted in the fascinating new account by Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 1.

14. De Bolla, p. 7.

15. T.S. Clouston, “The Developmental Aspects of Criminal Anthropology,” in Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 23 (1893/4) 215, cited in Green.

16. Johann Casper Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy (London: Robinson, 1789) 16-17.

17. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960) 82.

18. Ibid., 88-9.

19. Ernst Gombrich, “The Mask and the Face: Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art,” in Art, Perception, and Reality, ed. Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972) 8.

20. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1989) 64.