Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

Abstract

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.1 One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.2 Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.3 I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.4 Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.5