Portraits, Privacy and Criminality
Back in September 2013 there were a rash of newspaper articles that declared that people were committing 'virtual suicide', that is, they were removing themselves from Facebook. Whilst only 12.6% complained about shallow conversations as the reason, over 48% cited security concerns, often surrounding the images they had themselves placed on the site.
Occasionally stories emerge describing cases of 'cyber stalking' as users complain that strangers are viewing images of themselves and/or their children and have access to their telephone numbers, email addresses and other personal details. The irony being lost in that the details on the site, along with the images were placed on the site, again, by themselves. There is a strange compulsion felt by many (apparently mainly younger) users to fill in all of the areas of the Facebook profile forms, seemingly unaware that much of the information requested is entirely voluntary.
Occasionally stories emerge describing cases of 'cyber stalking' as users complain that strangers are viewing images of themselves and/or their children and have access to their telephone numbers, email addresses and other personal details. The irony being lost in that the details on the site, along with the images were placed on the site, again, by themselves. There is a strange compulsion felt by many (apparently mainly younger) users to fill in all of the areas of the Facebook profile forms, seemingly unaware that much of the information requested is entirely voluntary.
It would appear that much of our concern over online privacy is self-created. Perhaps we should do well to consider Facebook et al for what they actually are, vast online databases, repositories for our personal data,messages and images. Whilst these social media sites make much of their security, breaches can, and do, occur, the recent leak of personal images of celebrities, often in revealing or compromising positions from Snapchat showed us two things; Firstly, that people are seemingly happy to send intimate photographs via social media, and secondly that Snapchat's claim not to retain images sent via its servers was apparently bogus.
This use of portraiture though is merely part of the evolution of the genre. Where portraiture with paint and brush was strictly the preserve of the rich, the arrival of photography was to change that. The camera became an important tool for may aspects of society, the Victorians found themselves in the position of being able to exchange family portraits with distant relatives, they could also indulge in a fashion for post-mortem photographs, relatives being propped up in front of the camera apparently still in life. (A bonus for the photographer as the dead did not move during the long exposures needed at the time.) Perhaps stranger, they could also develop a taste for faked beheadings of their relatives. The Victorian era camera was also becoming an important evidential tool, though as discussed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, the police images of the time bear more resemblance to classical portrait than anything we would recognise today. Barthes was writing about the image of Lewis Payne (right) pictured in custody after the attempted murder of US Secretary of State William H Seward in 1865. Police photographs continued in this style until the 'mug shots' of which we are more familiar came into use, this involved the full face and accompanying profile images shot from fixed distance with records being kept of the suspects physical features, a process invented by Parisian police photographer Alphonse Betillon. These were then stored in an archive that could be checked when a suspect was arrested or indeed a crime committed that fitted a known modus operandi. That an image of a suspect, or indeed convicted criminal, could become politicised was about to find it's place in photography. In his work 'The Body and the Archive', Alan Sekula argued that the new fashion was derived from the 'science' of Phrenology and physiognomy that were worked together to influence the emergent 'science' of Eugenics. A British advocate of Eugenics, Francis Dalton, obtained prisoner photographs from inmates of Millbank prison and painstakingly created multiple layered exposures of the faces. Although facial details were lost in the act of multiple superimposure traits tended to be emphasised. To Galton these traits became evidence that there was indeed a 'criminal type'. As Sekula phrased it, 'Bertillon sought to embed the image in the archive', while Dalton 'sought to embed the archive in the image'. Police portraiture has continued to evolve into the digital era, most police force area websites contain facebook-like galleries of shots of wanted suspects, often in the style that has come to largely define our perception of photographed criminality; the blocky indistinct image from a CCTV camera shot from above. It's interesting to note that nature of these images is that they show a crime in progress, not a crime being deterred. Fascinating collection of 1920's Police Photographs HERE Collection of Victorian 'beheading portraits' HERE Alan Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive' can be read HERE |