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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathArchive—post/photographic
 
History Painting: Shopping Mall (Wagg, Jamie)Composite-Fotografie (Galton, Francis)Big Brother (Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, Khomeini) (Burson, Nancy), 1983
 
 
 

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storage, a point I made in the introduction. There was an intense examination of this shift in artistic practices. In his work «History Painting: Shopping MallJamie Wagg used an image out of a video surveillance sequence that gained sad notoriety. [67] The digital processing Wagg applies to the image out of the video stream alludes to police image analysis methods. [68] As set out in the section «The police archive—Criminal records,» according to Allan Sekula the sheer «volume of the images» constituted the «fundamental problem of the archive» for the apparatuses of the state. [69] Today, the increasing improvement of image analysis allows a new type of treatment of images, which in a certain way represents a synthesis of Bertillon's process of placing images into an order system and Galton's aim of crystallizing the typical out of the specific. Because only through a process of mathematical ‹crystallizing out› can the placement into an order system be successful; the recognition of the specific individual may continue to be the focus— but on the basis of his typical traits. While Galton, for example, superimposed twenty criminals in a composite photograph in order to find

 

the typical criminal, the task now facing the relevant image analysis software is to pin down the typical traits of a single criminal, that is, on the other hand to subtract the general average person from the individual. Regarded in this way, it is extraordinarily characteristic that one of the earliest artistic implementations of digital image processing by Nancy Burson directly followed Galton's composite photography. She produced her images as early as the beginning of the 1980s, images in which, for example, portraits of different ‹dictators› (Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, Hitler, Khomeini) are fused together into a composite image of «Big Brother» — to use Sekula's words, she draws the archive together in individual images.

Publication of the private

The tendency towards the expansion of the police archive to potentially include dragnet searches for, and video surveillance of, everyone fits in with the fact that the previously relatively clear boundaries between public and private are being perforated. [70] Nowhere is this more obvious than in the domestic uses of

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