Reasoned and Unreasoned Images

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, photography underwent one of the most momentous transformations in its history, a renegotiation of the camera&;s relationship to the visible world. Reasoned and Unreasoned Images considers in detail the work of three photographic investigators who developed new uses for the medium that centered on &;the photography of the invisible&;: Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Etienne-Jules Marey. Bertillon attempted to establish a &;science of identity&; by making photographic records of criminal bodies. Galton may be said to have taken photographs of ideas: he sought to create accurate yet abstract images of such entities as &;the criminal&; and &;the lunatic.&; And Marey, a physiologist, created photographic visualizations of nonvisible events&;the positions through which bodies pass so quickly that they cannot be seen. Ellenbogen approaches the work of these photographers as a means to develop new theoretical perspectives on questions of broad interest in the humanities: the relation of photographs to the world and their use as agents of knowledge, the intersections between artistic and scientific images, the place of painting and drawing in photography&;s historical employment, and the use of imaging technologies in systems of social control and surveillance.