Who needs the CIA: Photography & A Nation of Snitches

[alice wellintown]

The invention of photography ... is no less significant for
criminology than the inventing of the printing press is for
literature. Photography made it possible for the first time to
preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The
detective story came into being when this most decisive of all
conquests of a person's incognito had been accomplished. Since then
the end of efforts to capture a man in his speech and actions has not
been in sight.

Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire

Double exposures: Arresting images in Bleak House and The House of Seven Gables
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1997 by Thomas, Ronald R
Among the first and most far-reaching consequences of the invention of
photography for the nineteenth century was the revolutionary effect
this technology had on the status of personal portraiture as an index
of personal identity. Through the magic of the camera lens, the
portrait, long an emblem of wealth and status among the privileged
classes, became an affordable symbol of middle-class respectability
and ascendancy. Within a few years of photography's arrival on the
scene in America and England, portrait studios appeared in practically
every city, and itinerant photographers moved from town to town to
meet the seemingly universal demand for producing portraits. Almost
from the moment of its introduction, however, photography was also
deployed in an entirely antithetical way. Not only an ideal medium for
personal celebration, photography provided an effective technology for
public surveillance as well-"a system capable of functioning both
honorifically and repressively," as Allan Sekula has put it-or, we
might say, of producing both positive and negative images of the
photographed subject (345; see figs. 1, 2).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3643/is_199710/ai_n8775861/