8. The Standardized Gaze: The Standardization of the Search Warrant in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential Traces

“…Contemporaneously, in France Alphonse Bertillon created an anthropometric and photographic system of identification in an attempt to prevent criminal recidivism (Cole 2001; Sekula 1986). This, too, had its precedents in similar, although less systematic attempts earlier in the century (Becker 2001). As Allan Sekula has remarked, the growing concern with the regulation and definition of criminal bodies in the 19th century led to a move toward increasingly careful classification and archiving of photographic information to “arrest” and “capture” the criminal photographically (1986) 11…”

“…Foucault 1973:171–172). The expert gaze that was needed to record these signs was increasingly institutionalized and refined over the course of the late 19th century (Becker 2001). In Britain, the anthropologist and eugenicist Francis Galton developed fingerprinting techniques to this end, building on practices developed in India by the colonial administrator William Herschel.…”

“…The conception of objectivity that emerged in the late 19th century was one in which the work of observation and record had to be purged of all subjective and evaluative judgments, allowing evidence to be recorded mechanically and without personal intervention, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (1992) have shown. In privileging the indexical content of evidence, the object and sign were conflated and treated as a single fact, disarticulated from social context and history, whether in practices of disease diagnosis, as Foucault has outlined (1973:59); individual identification (Becker 2001:148); or the evidence of past events that the dead reveal (e.g., Paperno 2001:108).…”

“…Freedberg 1989:93–98) that acted to assert the relationship between relic and its object. Reliquaries or the scrupulous labeling of forensic science both provide a way to constrain the reading of bodily traces and to elicit trust in their status and context (see Becker 2001:141; also Figure 1). 16 It is no surprise to learn in this context that the skull held by Tom Baxter is said to have the initials “E.…”

Ecologies of Belonging and the Mugshot Aesthetics

“…For example, even before the invention of the photograph, the French and German police promoted standard techniques and methods for the identification of individuals and its documentation. As Peter Becker (2001) shows, this was a historical moment in which the development of modern European states and of its policing bureaucracies and practices motivated and required a standardization, articulation and formalization of policemen's intuitive and savy techniques for 'eyeing up' suspects. In the late 19 th century for example, Alphonse Bertillon's portrait parlé provided a physiognomic description based solely on comparison of bodily traits, graphic description and classification.…”