¶ … Evidence, Truth, and Order
Tagg, John. "Evidence, Truth and Order: A Means of Surveillance" From Visual Culture: The Reader. Edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. New York: Sage, 1999, pp. 244-273. Originally published as Tagg, John. "A Means of Surveillance: Photograph as Evidence in Law," in John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Evidence, Truth, and Order. London: Macmillan, 1988, pp. 66-102.
State author's biographical notes
Who is John Tagg?
Tagg is an author, photographer, and post-modern theorist. All of these many identities of the author coalesce into his ideological essay upon the nature of photography, the legal system, and photographs of prisoners. Currently, he is professor of art history at SUNY Binghamton in New York State. He is also the author of Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (1982) and The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988).
What are the terms and vocabulary of Tagg's essay?
Technology: Photography no longer a rare and expensive production in the 19th century
The 19th century oversaw the development of new consumer markets, the growth of an advanced...
Photography was poised for a new phase of expansion into advertising, journalism, and the domestic market while the industrial revolution overall resulted in a more standardized and structured method of disseminating capitalist productions for profit.
Obedience: Necessary for capitalism
According to Tagg, the pressing problem was how to train and mobilize a diversified workforce while instilling docility and practices of social obedience?
The answer was surveillance!
Michel Foucault has called the hospital, the asylum, the school, the prison, the police force all disciplinary methods and techniques of regulated examination. Through examination, classification, and the sense of being 'watched' even when one is not under the eye of authority, obedience is produced. At the same time these institutions were perfecting their methods of disciplinary control and capitalism was burgeoning, photographic evidence came into inexpensive and popular use.
Elaborate Main Points
During the 19th century, thus photography became popular as a method of surveillance and control…
