The Body and the Archive
Citation
Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.
Relevance
Sekula’s most extended analysis of the photograph as a bureaucratic and disciplinary instrument. The essay traces the history of photographic identification systems — police archives, physiognomical surveys, Bertillon’s criminal identification system, Galton’s composite portraits — to argue that photography has functioned since the nineteenth century as a technology of social surveillance and normalization. This argument extends the ideological critique of Sekula’s 1981 “Traffic in Photographs” (src-sekula-1981) into a specific genealogy of the photograph-as-archive. Its relevance to The Family of Man is structural: the Steichen exhibition assembled a massive photographic archive that purported to represent universal humanity — but Sekula’s genealogy of such archival ambitions exposes the normalizing and exclusionary logic that underwrites any claim to represent “all” humanity through photography.
October is named in CREDIBILITY.md as a Tier-2 peer-reviewed journal. The essay is among the most-cited in the critical-photography literature.
Key excerpts / pages
- Access status (2026-04-30): JSTOR URL
https://www.jstor.org/stable/778312— attempted; returned HTTP 403. Full text NOT retrieved. Body text NOT consulted in this round. - Volume, issue, and page range (October vol. 39, Winter 1986, pp. 3–64): carried from standard bibliographic citation in secondary literature; NOT independently verified against the article in this session. The JSTOR stable number 778312 is the standard library reference for this article; whether this resolves to the correct article has NOT been verified in this round (403 blocked the check).
- No verbatim passage can be quoted from a primary fetch in this round.
- Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: the Sandeen study does not centrally engage with Sekula’s body-and-archive argument (it concerns social history more than theoretical genealogy). NOT re-fetched for page-level cross-reference.
Notes
- Date note: The task brief cites this essay as “Sekula 1981 ‘The Body and the Archive’ (October 39).” However, October vol. 39 is Winter 1986, not 1981. The
year: 1986in this entry reflects the journal publication date, which is the standard bibliographic date. If the brief’s “1981” refers to an earlier draft or a different publication context, that has NOT been verified in this round.verified: falsecovers this uncertainty. - The essay is reprinted in: Sekula, Allan. Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983. Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984. — NOTE: if the book appeared in 1984, the October publication (1986) postdates the book; this ordering inconsistency is flagged but not resolved in this round. The 1984 book may contain a different or earlier version.
- Cross-reference to
src-sekula-1981(earlier companion essay). Cross-reference tosrc-sekula-1984-photography-against-the-grain(collected essays). Cross-reference tosrc-sekula-1986-reading-an-archive(companion Block essay, same year). - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995(anchor for Family of Man reception history). - Perspective: Marxist / materialist critique, with Foucauldian genealogical method applied to photographic archives.
verified: false: JSTOR returned 403; body text NOT consulted in this round. Volume, issue, and page range carried from standard secondary citation. The JSTOR stable number is the standard library reference for this article.