In Practices of Looking, science and culture are discussed as interrelated subjects that “are always mutually emerged.” As time passes, more knowledge is gained and helps culture grow to embrace new concepts that become the basis of ideologies for that time period. The use of photography is a significant tool that has benefited the changes made in the science field and has shaped what we know as the norm. Photography utilizes the separate entities of science and culture and is combined within Michel Foucalt’s term of biopower to regulate individuals. “Images help to shape the meaning of the body in ways that tell us a great deal about ideology, gender, identity and concepts of disease.” Images, beginning with photos are the clues to the giant puzzle of science and the more they are evaluated, the more they are engrained into culture. In this blog I will discuss Foucalt’s ideology of biopower and how photography has been used to monitor social organization.
The art and use of photography in the nineteenth century started the modern developments found within science and medicine. To visually document medical findings and experiments, photography enhanced what the human eye couldn’t see and improved accuracy into what was being observed in the medical field. With its widespread growth in popularity in the medical field, Foucalt explains how photography also became a tool set to classify people in systems in his term, biopower.
According to Foucalt, the use of biopower, or the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects, “could be used as a means of social organization and control.” With the documentation and classification of the individuals who were permanently or temporarily staying in the public space, the camera was and is still used today to capture different cases and classify residents “into groups on the basis of empirically visible features thought to signify features that marked common identity characteristics.”
Specifically, photographs were popularly used to help identify the cases and residents who had visible features of a mental illness. Prison managers used photos to classify the physical features of criminal types as well as having individual records for repeat offenders. Hospitals and prisons looked for similar characteristics in cataloguing subjects by their visual appearance to compare signs of what was perceived as abnormal physical features that put them in the categories of being crazy or a criminal. The inaccuracies in classifying a person based on observation of his physical characteristics is a part of the ignorant ideologies of the time.
Today, doctors look not solely on the outside but have the technology to see activity within the brain that can be a way to detect chemical imbalances in individuals who may be mentally ill or monitor brain wave activity to explain ones neurological reasons for behaving a certain way. What was catalogued and stereotyped then to be crazy or harmful about a person is still a misconception we bare in our society. We know it is very common for one to have a mental illness therefore our tolerance has increased in knowing that many people can cope with the disease with help of medicine and therapy. Still, due to the nineteenth century practice of separating “crazy” people from society and studying them based on their mannerisms, people associate mainly negative connotations behind hearing about the mentally ill still to this day.
Foucalt's practice of biopower is still seen in today’s society and the use of photography in science has only grown to what seems to be limitless opportunities within the unknown boundaries of technology. In a society with more knowledge and more technology at our fingertips, people are still classified into groups and systems that manage humans. The reason behind separating the mentally ill or prisoners for instance has surpassed the surface of racial profiling yet we rely on past meanings to claim the universal truths that have been culturally interrelated.
Science and culture do intersect and biopower is Foucalt’s description of how social cataloguing is seen today. It is hard to unlearn something that is taught to be true for society and with the help of photography, images have become a favorable key into learning the surface of what can be learned about an individual. Now in the digital era science is learning more about the genetic makeup of the internal picture teaching us new and accurate “truths” about the social classifications discussed in this blog.
~Tiffani Wilshire
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