On his homepage Andreas Broeckmann, director of the new media festival transmediale, has published the study "A Visual Economy of Individuals: The Use of Portrait Photography in the Nineteenth-Century Human Sciences". It is the revised version of the PhD thesis written for the
University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, 1995
http://isp2.srv.v2.nl/~andreas/phd/

This study investigates the uses of portrait photography in the nineteenth-century sciences of Anthropology, Psychiatry, and Criminal Anthropology, and discusses these practices in relation to applications of photography in Criminalistics, and to the portraits made by high street photographers. The main examples for these photographic practices are taken from various European countries, including France, Britain, Germany, Austria, and Italy, and are discussed and compared in their respective social, historical, and scientific contexts. Among the sources which are being examined are the British manual Notes & Queries and the works of Gustav Fritsch in Anthropology, the writings of John Conolly, Henri Legrand du Saulle and other psychiatrists, the publications and collections of criminologists like Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Alexandre Lacassagne, and the literature on Alphonse Bertillon’s system of police photography. Other material under discussion includes the publications of Paul Broca, Charles Darwin, A. A. E. Disdéri, Francis Galton, Henry P. Robinson, and the influential French photographer Albert Londe.
The study assesses recent contributions to the historiography of scientific representation and seeks to re-evaluate the significance of photography in the period between 1850 and 1900. It is argued that the epistemological status of photographs hinged on the emotive impact they had on the observer. Ultimately, it was the latter's subjective reaction that served to affirm the status of objectivity of the representations. Simultaneously, the observer's subjectivity itself was articulated by the practices involved in the use of portrait photographs. The dispositif photographique thus served to constitute a visual economy of individuals which contributed to the affirmation of social positions and a distinct sense of self for the social agents.