"Tracing the Individual Body" - Lauren Iacobucci

Beginning to understand the various early applications of photography (and cinema) is quite interesting, especially its use in detection and criminology, such as is described in Tom Gunning’s article “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema. We know that photography was used for record-keeping purposes, which Charles Baudelaire states should be its only purpose, but understanding its use for identifying criminals is rather astonishing, especially considering how this application pre-dated the digital era and how it affected the entertainment world.

There are two main points of Gunning’s article that I find particularly intriguing. The first is his poetic explanation of how a photograph denies a man control over his own identity, similarly to how Walter Benjamin describes how the film camera removes the aura of the actor. His second interesting point is about the reaction of the entertainment world (be it fiction novels, film, plays, etc.) to these progresses in the use of photography for criminal identification.

Throughout his article, Gunning repeatedly brings up how “the system” is able to exert “power over the criminal’s body and image” through the process of photographing criminals and keeping an elaborately organized archive of these photographs (p 30 of article). This point is rather interesting because it brings up knowledge of the myth that a photograph steals a part of one’s soul. Even if disfiguration of one’s own face doesn’t allow a criminal to outrun the authorities because they have his identity on record, we begin to realize that we have no power over the outcome of our own identity and thus, the actions of our pasts. This is especially alarming today when one considers how widely used surveillance is and, according to movies about the modern urban future, how powerful surveillance can become for “the system”.

Gunning’s other point, about detection in the entertainment world, is fascinating more so in regards to how humans reacted to this new technological phenomenon of photography. There are two quotes pertaining to this matter in “Tracing the Individual Body” that I find particularly intriguing. The first is about the publics’ reaction to the use of photography for the identification of criminals: “The public display of portraits of professional criminals… became one of the most popular forms of photographic galleries, with tourists flocking to them as an urban sight….” (24) The second occurs in Gunning’s discussion of the emergence of surveillance: “The camera recording the very act of malefaction appears in drama, literature, and early film before it was really an important process of criminal detection.” (35) Not only is it ironic that the entertainment world came up with this application of the camera before the police system did, but it is also ironic that this fascination with the photograph as a witness was portrayed in the cinema, the latter actually following photography chronologically.