The Body and the Archive

I respond to this passage with aw, because of the fact that it went into many different directions to come to one conclusion. It talks about how photography was being used as part of the policing agenda to identify criminals and keep a better track on them. Next, it goes into pure scientific theories, trying to convey how to find traits using the human body of the inmates to catch a class of potential criminals or something. However, I was really bewildered by the part where he talks about setting points for the different races and of course the Africans having the lowest, plus the finger print solution was doing just find. Although this evolve to what we now know as the mug shots and it is a good way to have the identity of criminals, I think he was trying to do too much scientific stuff with just photos of their bodies. I see why this is just a paraphrase of his research and experiments of this project.

Pictures for Rent

I think the development of stock photography is a relationship to how a lot of passionate things we have done has been turned into a market for the media to use on us. For example, almost everything that we have been doing for the passion has become part or is a business. Whether that be sports or art that is being used. It reminds me of how today researchers for companies try to find the ideal consumers want and advertise it as an image of the average consumer to sell to us. Get back to how stock photography was used initially as photography in an artistic sort of view until it got into to corporate, where it turned into mirror pictures of us as consumers to be used by advertising companies.