It’s a Match!
Jiangtao Harry Gu and Kylie Thomas on Resistant Objects

Rather than lectures, this event series is a staged conversation, clash or celebration of two people with two distinct positions. Sometimes a blind date, sometimes a fierce competition, sometimes a surprising counterpart, or the perfect fit, in these matches the two speakers will first each present their perspective on a given theme or project, to then discuss divergences or conflations with the audience. From fiery disagreements to harmonious affirmations, the conversation series organized by the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” aims to refract perspectives on historical narratives as well as reconstruct creative processes.

As governments around the world increasingly utilize identification technologies such as facial recognition, biometric databases, and digital ID systems to manage and control populations through processes of inclusion and exclusion, this session looks to two historical case studies in order to uncover the inherent paradox embedded within seemingly neutral bureaucratic attempts at identification and classification.

Media historian Jiangtao Harry Gu will begin by asking: why are American passport photos square when most other countries use rectangles? To answer this question, he will examine the early history of photographic identification in the United States, tracing it back to the Certificate of Residence papers that Chinese immigrants were required to carry under the 1893 amendment of the Chinese Exclusion Act. While the Bureau of Engraving and Printing under the Treasury Department controlled the design and printing of the certificates, existing portrait formats and counterfeit practices also helped shape the dimension of the required photograph. Because these certificates were portable objects meant to be folded and tucked away, their everyday use exposed the contradictions behind what it required to be a law-abiding subject: Chinese carriers tried to protect the photograph from wear and tear, yet in their attempt to demonstrate compliance, the awkward format made folding inevitable and cut cross the integrity of the state’s demand. These contradictions point to a larger issue. Bureaucratic formats are rarely rational or consistent. While they are designed to enforce compliance, their very rigidity often prevents it. In foregrounding these contradictions, Gu’s research questions the effect and authority of bureaucratic codes. 

In her presentation, Kylie Thomas will consider how apartheid-era identification photographs provide a vivid way to consider the paradox of how individual portraits formed part of the obsessive production and policing of so-called “population groups” and played a central role in the practices of segregation and ethnic-cleansing that defined apartheid. Identification photographs were also used by the Security Police to target those who were, in the barely coded language of the time, to be “permanently removed from society”. Connecting the dual uses to which these images were put serves as a reminder of how apartheid was not only a series of human rights violations, but a crime against humanity that operated through the systematic erasure of citizenship rights and the obliteration of personhood. This talk will focus on the resistant potential of a single identification photograph in the struggle for justice in the aftermath of apartheid.