I must admit that I checked to make sure that I was reading from the right reader many times because the subject matter is almost identical to what we have been discussing in my medical sociology class this week. As I read the sentences, “photography, through its indexicality, iconic accuracy, and mobility of circulation, provides the ultimate means of tying to a specific and unique body. In this way the process of criminal identification represents a new aspect of the disciplining of the body which typifies modernity,” my mind immediately darted to Michele Foucault and his theory of embodied power (6). And then, one paragraph later, his name popped up! It hadn’t occurred to me, although it makes perfect sense in retrospect, that photography was invented during the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution, starting around 1820 and slowing down in the latter years of the nineteenth century, brought about dynamic changes in the organization of people and labor. We have agreed that the first photograph was developed in 1827 and the technique morphed and developed well into the twentieth century. Kris alluded to the theory of technological determinism in class on Tuesday. She described the theory as suggesting that a technology is invented and the world changes around it. It is as if the technology miraculously and unexpectedly “dropped from heaven.” I have approached the invention of photography from this lense up to this point, probably because most of what we have read has centered on what photography did rather than how it became. But the dates seem awfully coincidental. Kris mentioned that the critique of technological determinism is that it dismisses the social, political, and economic context of every invention. Kracauer situates the advent of the photograph in a time of positivism and a desire for realism, suggesting that the invention can be artistically and theoretically contextualized. Like Kracauer, Gunning breaks from technological determinism and argues that the invention of photography was influenced by a need to maintain order and control among the newly formed urban populations. He says that modernity caused “an extension of the power and productivity of the human body and a consequent transformation of the body through new thresholds of demand and danger, creating new regimes of bodily discipline and regulation” (3). Foucault’s theories are foundationalized in the idea that the changing economic and social structure of the Industrial Revolution demanded an increase in state power over the deviant masses. Gunning quite eloquently proclaims that “Photography serves the purpose of surveillance and identification necessary to a bureaucratic police system by establishing identity through its mesh of iconic resemblance and identical reference” (13). The individual in a population is identified through their body. The article reads, “By falling under the regime of photography, the criminal became a corpus delicti, his own body supplying evidence of guilt” (16). Because a photograph is an index of a material reality, something that represents an event that occurred in real time and space, it is a mechanism of control. Foucault would go so far as to say that the power of photography is so diffuse that it disciplines our bodies—we avoid doing wrong not because of our own moral conscious, but rather out of the fear of being caught.