Reation to "The Body and the Archive" by Allan Sekula

"Photography continued to serve the sciences, but in a less grandiose and exalted fashion, and consequently with more modest - and frequently more casual - truth claims, especially on the periphery of the social sciences."

In it's early use, photography served as a measure of hierarchy in terms of the social, physical, scientific, moral, natural and utilitarian. Every photographic represented a public moment of the individual, which objectified stereotypes through 'realistic' aesthetics. Thereafter, photographs were used as an archival tool of the bureaucrats through a system of True intelligence.

This concept of universality revealed that "photography promised more than a wealth of detail; it promised to reduce nature to its geometrical essence." The capacity of the Absolute photographic image revealed a universality previous media could not: written language of mathematics. Previous media was unable to replicate reality through it's physical medium, such as paint, bronze or plaster. Photography as an 'advanced' technology promised this mathematical concreteness through its process of capturing the image. Rather than human's interpretation of the physical world, a mechanical machine actualized the image. Thus, the use of social hierarchy through image was justified through these mathematical and True representations of the human body.

Thus Galton exclaimed in an essay on the "generic image" that mental images "consisted of blended images and the genera produced by his optical process." This rationalizes the human as an inadequate medium for processing and assigning social hierarchies, racial stereotypes and biological truth based solely on observational knowledge. Conversely, early photographic depiction of the physical world did, through mathematics and it's utilitarian universality. Furthermore, the photographic image as a new media "attempted to preserve the value of an older, optical model of truth in a historical context in which abstract, statistical procedures seemed to offer the high road to social truth and social control."