"Tracing the Individual Body" -Maya Swanson

Tom Gunning’s article “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema” was really interesting to me because I love detective stories! It was neat to see how photography could be applied to life situations, such as detective work, because none of the other articles we have read actually applied photography to new situations.
In the article, Gunning gives many quotes from Sherlock Holmes novels, one of them concerning a duke’s affair; “Holmes makes it clear that the Grand Duke’s indiscretion lies in having been photographed with his mistress, rather than in having had a love affair…As a mode of evidence that cannot be denied, photography is indeed indiscreet, capturing information that could otherwise be hushed up or explained away.” A photograph, according to Gunnings and as proved by Holmes, is a permanent public record. It is very hard to dispute a photograph, which is known for recording accuracy. Without the photograph to provide indisputable evidence, it would have been easy for the Duke’s affair to be denied. If for example only one person had seen the two together, it would have been one person’s word against the Dukes. But the photograph allowed the entire world to see them together. The photograph would have the final word in a situation because of its complete objectivity; “(The Photograph) is an objective mechanical means of making an image with only minimal human intervention.”
Another important contribution photography gave to detective work was its ability to identify people. A photograph serves as a record of someone’s image, which can later be matched to the real person. “The photograph could be used as a guarantor of identity and as a means of establishing guilt or innocence…The body reemerges as something to grab hold of, and the photograph supplies one means of gaining a purchase on a fugitive physicality.” The photograph marks the individual, allowing police to keep tract of people. It is essential for identification.
As Gunnings says, “Photography became the ideal tool of the process of detection, the ultimate modern clue.”