Atlas Fever

When Special Collections staff at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles brought out a number of fascinating objects from its archives to show a group of USC doctoral students this summer, Simon Judkins’ attention was immediately caught by a 19th-century French photograph album.

Impressively bound in black leather, and embellished with silver corner bosses and embossed gold leaf, the handsome book contained 178 mug shots of pickpockets arrested at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.

“It’s a beautiful object, and since I’m very interested in surveillance and biometrics, I was immediately intrigued by it,” said Judkins, a doctoral student in history at USC Dornsife and one of seven USC Ph.D. students participating in the summer seminar, “Atlas Fever: From Memory System to Database.” Co-sponsored by the GRI and USC Dornsife’s Visual Studies Research Institute (VSRI), the course was part of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate, an interdisciplinary, university-wide graduate program offered by VSRI.

A shared interest in visual organization

The five-week course was co-taught by two generations of scholars — Tom Mitchell of the University of Chicago, a founder of visual studies and editor of the prestigious journal Critical Inquiry, and Justin Underhill, a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with VSRI and a Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow at USC Dornsife.

The course developed out of a paper Mitchell, whose authorial name is W.J.T. Mitchell, presented at the VSRI last fall titled “Method, Madness and Montage.”

“Tom and I are both very interested in how new media is going to change our relationship to art history,” Underhill said. “The course came together because we have a shared interest in the way we use atlases and arrays of pictures to organize our world visually and to understand it.”

Mitchell’s favorite example of this is the detectives’ evidence wall — an object familiar to all crime and mystery lovers.

“Every movie with a mystery has that picture of an evidence wall, and the accompanying belief that if you look at it long enough you’ll be able to conjure all the facts and find the killer,” said Underhill, who described co-teaching the course with Mitchell as “a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Mitchell said the course developed out of his long-standing interest in images and image display as both instruments of knowledge and symptoms of what he calls “iconomania,” the frenzied search for total comprehension of a world — hence the title, “Atlas Fever.”

“The two foundational icons of the course were the grid or geometrical matrix of rationality and order, and the vortex or labyrinthine tangle of confusion and disorder,” Mitchell said. “The idea was suggested by the juxtaposition of these two forms, the grid and vortex, in a film about mental illness, Crazy Talk, made by my son, Gabriel Mitchell, who suffered from schizophrenia for twenty years until his death in 2012.”

Simon Judkins, doctoral student in history. Photo courtesy of Simon Judkins.

Mitchell suggested that the same dialectic of visual order/disorder is captured nicely in a New Yorker cartoon showing a pair of detectives looking at an evidence wall with images and texts linked by a network of yarn.  The caption reads:  “It all comes back to this ball of yarn.” 

“Of course the yarn is a kind of verbal/visual pun, betokening the “yarn” or story that the detectives are trying to find in (or impose on) the array of evidence, and the infinite tangle of complexity that confronts any attempt to ‘see a world’ in a finite display of evidence,” he said. “The Getty, with its fabulous collection of atlases, and USC, with its wonderful program in Visual Studies, provided the perfect partnership for exploring this topic.”

“A wonderful resource for students”

Open to doctoral students from across USC, the course drew participants from a variety of disciplines including comparative literature and media, history, art history and critical studies at the USC School of Cinema. Classes met twice a week at the GRI, giving students unprecedented access to the rich local archival resource of its Special Collections.

Each student was required to select an object from the collections that was related both to their research interest and to the course content and write a research paper on it. This enabled students to explore a wide range of both early and late modern atlas projects. 

“Many of our faculty have been very involved with the Getty and in particular with the GRI,” said Vanessa Schwartz, professor of history and art history, and director of VSRI. “This is a wonderful resource for our students because they have been able to consult unbelievable archival material that scholars are willing to travel the world to see and here at USC we are fortunate to have it right on our doorstep.

“Partnerships, like this one with the Getty, are what a research institute like Visual Studies is all about. It acts as an umbrella to bring together people and resources.”

Detective work on a detective’s work

Judkins’ decision to concentrate his research focus on the photograph album yielded fascinating results relating to his interest in the history of biometrics.

Almost certainly created by a chief of detectives at the Paris fair, the album originally contained 200 photographs. However, as some were missing, it was possible to see the backs of others through the space where the absent card would have been. Printed on the back of each card was a standardized set of biometric abbreviations, including height, heir and eye color. After carrying out some detective work of his own, Judkins’ research revealed that the cards were part of an elaborate biometric technology created by Alphonse Bertillon, an archivist at the Paris Prefecture of Police.

“Bertillon was massively influential in the development of biometrics, creating one of the first systems based on precise bodily measurements that could create a unique index of a human body independent of the control of the subject,” Judkins said.

The purpose was to identify repeat criminals: prior to Bertillon, there was no scientific, repeatable way to identify criminals, who routinely gave fake names to arresting officers.

“This is a story about the individual’s loss of control over their own identity, and the state’s assumption of that power,” Judkins said. “It is a key moment in the long history of biometrics.”

The course helped Judkins advance his thinking considerably on his dissertation topic, he said.

“In that sense it has been the single greatest intellectual experience for me here at USC, and I couldn’t have had it without the cooperative efforts of the Getty and the VSRI.”