Chapter Three 
The Archive 

3.1 The Vast Photographic Archive 

Photography has been, almost since Daguerre's process was announced at the Royal Academy in 1839, a major component in the development of the culture of surveillance we live in today. In this section, I want to connect my archive with practices of institutional and personal surveillance that contributed very heavily to the growth of capitalist society in the nineteenth-century. 

In the mid-late 1800's, "there emerged a new group of administrators intent on studying the population in all its aspects and producing a knowledge that was measurable and concrete."(1)  This new group of administrators created systems of knowing people based on evidence gathered by selectively photographing and systematically collecting data about subjects. John Tagg describes the making of these photo-informational systems within the context of changing social and economic relations of the Victorian era. "The coupling of evidence with photography in the second half of the nineteenth century was bound up with the emergence of new institutions and new practices of observation and record-keeping…the police, prisons, asylums, hospitals…"(2)  

I have already mentioned Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, which has had a huge impact on prison construction and discussions about visibility. At this point, of primary interest is the respective works of Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon in their projects of criminal, psychological and racial classification. As will be made clear, in the process of creating their systems of classification, both Galton and Bertillon helped contribute to the economy of difference that typifies of Western capitalist society. 

Galton worked toward illustrating a theory of eugenics by making composite photographs. He exposed photographic plates several times using different subjects who, in each composite image, he identified as belonging to a particular 'type.' For example, he photographed onto single plates (respectively) men convicted of the same crime, women diagnosed with the same malady (quite often 'hysteria'), and Jewish or African men. As Alan Sekula writes, "Galton sought to generalize" 'types' through his composite photographs. Sekula describes Bertillon, in contrast, as a man who "sought to individuate."(3)  

Bertillon is considered the granddaddy of police mugshots. In his lifetime, he developed methods of technical standardization for photographing criminals, and lay the groundwork for the collection of information about them. Bertillon established the first photographic archive, each item containing data deemed important: the crimes committed, distinctive marks, physical attributes, and physiognomic measurements (which had gained currency in racially motivated studies on evolution at that time). Bertillon arranged his file cards in cabinet drawers which were divided according to cross-references made between different components of the system. 

An important connection Sekula makes between these two archivists is their use of Adolphe Quetelet's concept of the 'average man' (l'homme moyen). Each surveilled subject could be placed on a scale, according to the data collected, either above, on par, or below average, in any number of traits. Of course, neither Bertillon nor Galton were using as subjects those afforded the classification of 'average', as was Quetelet, in his studies on social statistics. This opens the door for what Tagg describes as a shift in the "threshold of visibility:" "For a long time ordinary individuality – the everyday individual of everybody [if such a person exists] – remained below the threshold of description. To be looked at, observed, described in detail…was a privilege…disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination."(4)  

Tagg's insight has tremendous valence, especially at a time when the June 2000 issue of Time Magazine features an article on 'real tv' and 'surveillance entertainment', and the  Globe & Mail, 8 July 2000, covers the same.(5)  

Lalvani, in his reading of Foucault's writing on power and knowledge, describes the disciplinary technologies of the photographic archive, the prison, hospital, and school as "the precondition[s] for the success of nineteenth century capitalism."(6)  And, as Tagg, Sekula and Lalvani note, nineteenth century capitalism succeeded because of the emergence of class division. In other words, photography worked with social statistics as a disciplinary apparatus to create a thin line of desirable habitation, based on relative definitions of 'normal,' 'average,' 'sane,' or 'law-abiding.' Tagg writes of the record as "an image produced according to certain institutionalized formal rules and technical procedures…in such a way that…more or less skilled and suitably trained and valid interpreters may draw inferences from them, on the basis of historically established conventions."(7)  

In considering the ways I became conscious of my own practices of self-surveillance, my interest in descriptions of the workings of ideological and disciplinary apparatuses in relation to surveillance has grown immensely – and I find myself near where I began, that is, concerned with who looks at who, how, and to what effect. In this sense, I am engaged in Foucault's appeal to "define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure."(8)  He to describes these disciplinary apparatuses as "new methods of power whose operation is not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus."(9)  

Of course, Foucault is referring to disciplinary apparatuses that include ideology, and to the self-monitoring subject. Sekula writes in detail about the maintenance of the upper class through its recognition of what it is not, as represented by the vast photographic archive of deviants. The sane assure themselves of their sanity in viewing images of those deemed 'insane.' And all this leads to a society of people watching themselves, monitoring their positions in relation to the 'average man,' and confirming their own (ideologically formulated) positions within this society – this fear of 'deviancy' is a tremendously motivating force toward awareness of and control over appearances.(10)  "In this sense, appearances as a social indicator of personality brought into a play a cybernetics of the social predicated on the other's gaze. Control over oneself could only be established by a constant policing of feeling which involved a cogitative distanciation from self."(11)  

 I am reminded of my earlier comment regarding being torn by the fear of becoming my perception of how I am seen, and question if I already have. Or, the request to please stop chopping onions. Even more disconcerting is the complicity with which we,(12)  as a society, have legitimated these dividing practices. 

3.2 The Vast Substitution Set 

In the process of creating girl before a mirror and, indeed, in researching and writing this thesis, I have acquired a new sensibility about how people view my self-portraits – particularly in relation to appearances and social disciplinary apparatuses. Haworth-Booth writes, 
"How is it exactly that we look at a photograph? First, obviously we see something inanimate that cannot respond to our gaze, and second, we recognize the photograph as something to be scanned, surveyed, examined all over, for any scrap of evidence."(13)  

I would like to replace the word 'evidence' for the more telling word 'knowledge.' To look is to see, is to know – looking is always bound up with knowledge and power. What we look for is either a confirmation of who we are, or a distanciation from what we are not. In these terms, Barthes 'punctum,' described as a "detail [that] attracts or distresses,"(14)  can also be defined as that which confirms or distances. Thus, the viewer's experience is empowering. 

girl before a mirror is an archive: an archive constructed with not only photographs but also with details about them, an archive that reveals information about systems of representation, classification, and my relation to the world of appearances. girl before a mirror is an archive that reveals not evidence, but the truth apparatuses that create evidence as such. The photograph alone is insufficient – sketchy perception of it as veracious substantiates this insufficiency. Sekula describes the combining of photographs with statistics as "signaling the inadequacy of visual empiricism,"(15)  and I would like to further suggest that it is not empirical knowledge, per se, that is sought after in visual culture. 

I am attempting to draw a parallel between the photo-statistical apparatus and girl before a mirror as revealing of this apparatus. Sekula writes: "We need to describe the emergence of a truth apparatus that cannot be adequately reduced to the optical model provided by the camera. The camera is integrated into a larger ensemble: a bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of 'intelligence.' This system can be described as a sophisticated form of the archive. The central artifact of this system is not the camera but the filing cabinet."(16) Where the filing cabinet of the archive represents this system of 'intelligence,' my combination of the image with data reveals this system as a social construction with a will to power.(17)  

Jacques Derrida skillfully describes the "violence of the archive itself" as "at once institutive and conservative."(18)  While archivists appear to manage impartial data, they in fact participate in managing presumptuous systems. In this sense, girl before a mirror resembles the impartial system, but it quite obviously is not an impartial system. The file cards and information contained on them are socially constructed representations. "The archive is both an abstract paradigmatic entity and a concrete institution. In both senses, the archive is a vast substitution set, providing for a relation of general equivalence between images."(19)  And to "decipher the archive," as Derrida suggests, "one must take into account…this 'distorted substitute."(20)  That is to say, one must account for what I have previously coined the self-paradigm to-be-looked-at. 

I am compelled to address the tautological space occupied by girl before a mirror in terms of my self-reflexive ways of working. Derrida states that the guardian of the archive (the archons) is "accorded…hermeneutic right and competence. [She has] the power to interpret the archives."(21)  Derrida also asserted that "archivization produces as much as it records the event"(22)  in differentiating between the archive itself and the act of archiving. These are two issues that I have been grappling with for some time now – specifically in relation to the never-ending possibilities I am afforded as archons to create new systems of managing data in my creation of this body of work. Developing these possibilities are like uncontrollable urges, similar to my initial urge to photograph myself. I am constantly aware of my activities, my actions as creator and manager as urges toward self-definition. They are urges "despite myself…impressed by the fact [or fear] that [I'm] going to completely disappear."(23)  

3.3 The Gallery 

I recently had a problem-solving discussion with my Advisor, Linda Duvall, about viewer access to my work within the gallery. Specifically, we discussed ways to arouse curiosity in viewers so that they would become engaged with operating the database. We imagined how people use the database in a Library. Working through many considerations for the operators of my database, I realized that some problems encountered were caused by a lapse in recognizing who would be operating my databse: viewers of art. "There comes a time when the self-absorption of the system is interrupted and the collection is enrolled within some external project…the object ends up confronting one [person] with another, thereby constitution itself as a message."(24)  The message of girl before a mirror is directed not to researchers of personal projects, as in a library, but toward viewers of art, in a specifically art context. When time comes to install girl before a mirror, it will be transformed from my own personal project into a "curatorial apparatus with its own archival imperative."(25)  

girl before a mirror is substantially different from other types of archives. Police archives have criminals, to which their records refer. Libraries have books. Provincial archives have boxes containing original and unique items. Museums have galleries and vaults that display and contain the objects of their records. In each of case, the record always refers to some object outside of its system of management. My recent discussion with Linda also raised the question 'to what does my archive refer?'  

Walter Benjamin has asserted that in a work of art, "the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,"(26)  and he argued vehemently against the inauthentic photograph in defining the 'aura' of the work of art. So, would the real referent please step forward? Is the object of my archive the file card, the contact-images on the file cards, which are the least physically removed from the negatives, or the 4x6 proofs I enlarged to create digital images for my website? Of course, the answer to these questions is 'yes.' girl before a mirror is both the object of the collection (the collection in and of itself) and a representative record of some external thing: me. 

Through the paradigm of girl before a mirror, I "isolate [myself] from [my] original context [in the moment, the flesh] and make [myself] museological…[I] surround [myself] with an aura that transform[s] these artifacts [of me] into modern-day relics."(27)  Self-reflexive relics within an art gallery. And only in the gallery can I allow my viewers "to see into my self-oriented discourse."(28)  

Recognizing girl before a mirror not as art-archive but as archive-art highlights a distinction between the disciplinary apparatus of the police archive and the apparatus of the museum or gallery. The police archive collects information about deviants. In so doing, it also defines and creates them. The art-archive collects the best art. Through the museum's mandate to collect and accession, its collection defines what is the best. All archives, through their inclusion (validation) and exclusion (invalidation) are tautological – in much the same manner as I have described the creation of my self-portraits, my worry and girl before a mirror as self-reflexive. 

I have several aims for girl before a mirror as a gallery installation, available for public viewing. By installing the 1585 file cards on all the walls, surrounding the viewer, I hope to achieve what Lalvani calls 'enframing,' which requires "total visibility and surveillance."(29)  In this setting, viewers within the space become observers equivalent to Bentham's prison guard. I hope that viewers will become engaged in what Sekula describes as "public looks: a look up, at one's 'betters,' and a look down, at one's 'inferiors'."(30)  In this sense, viewers can either confirm or dismiss, self-recognize or self-distanciate, as self-reflexive observers concerned – if even on an ideological level – with appearances.(31)  Finally, I hope my viewers will become further participants in "that immense will to knowledge"(32)  [i.e. power] of the West through actively controlling girl before a mirror as database operators. If viewers conduct even a single search – if viewers click a button with the mouse and view even one file of the database – they will be linked to me not only through their own curiosity to look/see/know, but will also become archons who are explicitly acting out a concern for power/knowledge. 

3.4 Girl Before a Mirror III – Conclusion 

girl before a mirror is both a construct and a non-struct. The work began un-self-consciously, insofar as the act of collecting was not initially apparent to me.(33)  The work that now finds its home, its domiciliation(34) , in the gallery, began as a very private, emotionally and existentially motivated mode of being. Within the gallery, this mode is transformed as a self-construction: the archive is the requisite "material technology" for self-knowledge.(35)  

Acknowledging, also, my ideological presence through this body of work, permits all the paradoxes of girl before a mirror to shine through. In the same way that I recognized that only the impression of gaining self-knowledge is achieved through my self-portraiture,(36)  I also recognize the construct of self-determination through it. As Celia Lury writes, "self-determination [is] an enabling myth…[and the] archive an enabling fantasy."(37)  In this sense, for the duration of time girl before a mirror is within the gallery, open to being viewed, the myth of self-determination is actualized: I will have achieved a state of invisibility; my presence will be deferred in favor of the self-paradigm of the art exhibit. 

Another level of invisibility occurs within the specific acts of control I exert in both daily ritual and in making art. When wrapped up in systems of control of my own creation – drafting and word-processing descriptors, trimming and mounting contact prints, enumerating and counting batch data, building over 3000 nearly identical web pages, and what have you – I am no longer present to myself. This lack of presence is similar to the way I daily re-discover I've a lighter or piece of lint between my fingers, despite having become conscious of those habits years ago. It is at this point that I see myself achieving the sort of absolute control that Elsner speaks of, which is 'only realized at the pitch where it can actually extinguish that which is controlled."(38)  

In the end – that is to say, once the work occupies the gallery space – the myth of self-determination is engendered through two means of relief from visibility: viewers will look not at me, but at my self-paradigm, and I will finally be able to look back. One of the fabulous discoveries I recently made about the website is that I can view which searches operators conduct, and which pages are visited by gallery visitors, and utilize the www.usask.ca web server to view this data for all visitors of the website, wherever they are located. The History folder in web browsers are designed to ease the user's return to previously visited websites. In the case of girl before a mirror, these viewing mechanisms will permit me to monitor (surveill) operators who are specifically monitoring (surveilling) and controlling (surveilling) my own systems of self-surveillance. 

I hoped not to end this thesis with a cliché, but I'm not sure how to avoid it. A little over a year ago, during a studio visit by the graduate committee and students, a member of the committee digressed from the specifics of the critique and asked "Does anyone here have any Hope?"(39)  The question, within that context, made an impression on me that was refreshed in my recent reading of Derrida, who perceives the archive as a sort of promise: 
"The word and the notion of the archive seem at first…to point toward the past, to refer to the signs of consigned memory, to recall faithfulness to tradition…As much as and more than a thing of the past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the future…To be open toward the future…would be not only to have a future, to be capable of anticipation…but to be in relation to the future as such, and to hold one's identity, reflect it, declare it, announce it to oneself, only out of what comes from the future to come."(40)  

What I call into question with girl before a mirror is the urge toward momentum and of my own relation to the future – and the inevitability of my own disappearance through self-portraiture and archive, into memory and narrative. 
 

(1)Lalvani, 28. 
(2)John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988) 5. 
(3)Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (1986): 3-64. 19. 
(4)Tagg, 89. 
(5)See also "Big Brother," broadcast on Global Television, "Survivor," broadcast on CTV, and the movies "Ed TV," and "The Truman Show." 
(6)Lalvani, 2-/30. 
(7)Tagg, 2. 
(8) "The object…is to define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure. The central issue [is] to account for the fact that it [in this case, sex] is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said." Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1976) 11. 
(9) Foucault, 89. 
(10)Please see footnote #4 on page 10. 
(11) Lalvani, 194. 
(12)I am assuming that my reader, most likely within the University, is neither impoverished, insane nor criminal, despite my ever leaning concern that I might be fooling myself. 
(13)Sandra S. Phillips, Mark Haworth-Booth & Carol Squires, Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997) 39. 
(14)Barthes, Camera Lucida, 40. 
(15)Sekula, 16. 
(16)Sekula, 16. 
(17)"Every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension." Frederick Neitzsche, "Will to Power," quoted in George Boeree, http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/index.html.  
(18)Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 7. 
(19) Sekula, 17. 
(20)Derrida, 88. 
(21)Derrida, 2. 
(22) Derrida, 17. 
(23)Schaffner quoting Duchamp, 128. 
(24) Baudrillard in Elsner, 24. 
(25) Sekula, 59. 
(26)Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1981) 322. 
(27) Schaffner, on Christian Boltanski, 79. 
(28)Baudrillard in Elsner, 24. 
(29) Lalvani, 17. 
(30) Sekula, 10. 
(31)Please refer back to page 32 regarding my own self-recognition and –disavowal when confronted with definitions of narcissism. 
(32) Foucault, 55. 
(33) "We are not always present to ourselves." Donna Harraway, "The Persistence of Vision," in Mirzoeff, 194. 
(34) "It is thus, in…domiciliation, in…house arrest, that archives take place. This dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks the institutional passage from the private to the public." Derrida, 2. 
(35) Harraway in Mirzoeff, 194. 
(36) Please refer back to the excerpt from "All Dressed Up and No Place to Go," p19. 
(37)Lury, 2/44. 
(38)Elsner, 3/4. 
(39) Patrick Traer in Bart Gazolla's studio, Spring 1999. 
(40)Derrida, 33/74.