Thomas John Barnes
1875 (ca)
No. 27, Once a Little Vagrant, and No. 28, Now a Little Workman

Cabinet cards
Barnardo Photographic Archive
Courtesy Barnardo Photographic Archive, Essex, England
 
Tactics used by Dr. Thomas John Barnardo have caused contemporary critics, such as John Tagg, to express concern with how photography had been deployed as "a means of surveillance." Tagg wrote: "We have begun to see a repetitive pattern: the body isolated; the narrow space; the subjection to an unreturnable gaze; the scrutiny of gestures, faces and features; the clarity of illumination and sharpness of focus; the names and number boards. These are the traces of power, repeated countless times, whenever the photographer prepared an exposure, in police cell, prison, consultation room, asylum, Home or school."
 
John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, "A Means of Surveillance," (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 87.
 
LL/33152