Disciplinary power

From:

Photography: The Question of Disciplinary Power by Tracie Falcucci (2010) pg.29-30.

Disciplinary power relates to the constant threat of observation and to the control that it has over individuals.  Through a structure of segregation and partitioning, continuous surveillance can lead to a disciplined society.  The threat of continuous observation can be as powerful as the act itself and it can in certain circumstances, like within the prisons walls, seem to have absolute control.  The mechanism of disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault believed, produces information relating to the individual or social body that is being observed.  By obtaining information in this way, it increases or reinforces the power over those being surveyed which forms a complex power and knowledge relationship (Foucault, 1977). 

Through exploring the scientific and technical advancements of photography and looking at how these developments overlapped with the establishment of the police force; the two uses of photography within the judicial system can be established.  The first is to identify; to categorise individuals and to remove rights and privileges of the detained.  The second is to record information, as a document, that can be used as evidence.  Later; photography became used as a tool of surveillance beginning in the early 1900’s with the suffragettes and this is when photography within law and the institution of the museum converged.  A repetitive pattern emerged during the 1870’s within institutional portraiture and the ‘social’ and the ‘administrative’ function of the photograph allowed for the upper-class and the criminal to be represented using the same means.  Traces relating to power are evident in the ‘narrow spaces; the subjection to an unreturnable gaze; the scrutiny of gesture…and sharpness of focus’ and these, Tagg States, are repeated ‘whenever the photographer prepared an exposure, in the police cell, prison, consultation room, asylum’ Tagg (1988 p.85).  Art photography may not have the power to remove rights from individuals as John Tagg believes, but it is able to question systems of power.

 Bibliography

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. London, Penguin

Tagg, J. (1988) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.