Reading Response 3 -The Body and the Archive

While reading Sekula's article, I found Bertillon's story was interesting, so I googled him. I found that Bertillon was not aware of the photographic concept mentioned by Sekula in his "The Body and the Archive" writing. Bertillon was obsessed with how to discover criminals by nuances between measurements of suspects. In Bertillon's perspective, photography only plays the role of a panoramic photo, which is more convenient to explore an optical difference. In fact, the concept of photography mentioned by Sekula is relatively unfamiliar. He noted that photography is a tool of science: optical realism. That is to say, photographic products are, in fact, extremely realistic so that photographic products can exist as authentic archives. However, it took a long time for such "archive" to be accepted back then. My question is, was the authenticity of photography also suspected back then. In my perspective, there was almost no use of photography as an art medium in the 18th century, but it was only in the 19th century that photography gradually entered the art field along with other emerging media. So why, as a scientifically and socially auxiliary technique, is rejected? It wasn't until Bertillon's success that photography as a document was slowly accepted? I can understand that by saying there is no problem with photography itself since it was widely perceived as a pure scientific tool, but Bertillon's use of photography has made remarkable achievements in crime and justice. At the end of this article, Sekula stated that the "Bertillon" concept still exists today, which is some kind of surveillance. In the era of big data, we are just the same as the criminal database as Bertillon was collecting from suspects of criminals.