Photography, surveillance, and disciplinary power in nineteenth-century institutions

¶ … 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 industrial organization and the invention of means of cheap and unlimited photomechanical reproduction. 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.

List further readings and/or resources if applicable

Tagg's essay reviews Michel Foucault discussion in the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham's vision of the prison a panopticon, as Foucault's Discipline and Punishment and his History of Sexuality, the French philosopher's two most famous texts on the diffusion of power through society and how the sense of being watched regulates behavior in a false, binary discourse of repression and liberation. He also applies Althusser's account of Ideological State Apparatuses to how the state deployed surveillance in its legal institutions regarding 'watchfulness' and being spied upon through the technical means of photography and Bentham's more conventional use of spies.

Additional Works Cited

Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.