In Allan Sekula's essay, "The Body and the Archive" he tries to show the connections between the archival paradigm and the operations of power that control and regulate the people, or 'the body'. To do this he places the emergence of photography in the context of the development of police acts and technologies of surveillance. He goes back to the 19th century to show the earliest stages of photography and show how tat the time photography was a paradox between an honorable usage: portraiture made available to lower classes, but also: a tool capable of identifying them to the police.

Also at this time in history there were two major sciences taking form. Physiognomy, studying someone's facial features to give insight into their personality, and phrenology, the study of different regions of the head (brain) to reveal things about their criminality. These sciences were to help police identify criminals. Towards the end of the essay Sekula puts modern photographers within this context to distinguish between those who accept the archival paradigm and those who oppose it.

At the very end of Sekula's essay he presents us with a modern example, that of Black South African photographer Ernest Cole, who's controversial images landed him on rough waters with the police. he was going to get into trouble with the law but he posed with a proposition instead. When the police offered him a position among their ranks he refused and fled his country, and published his book of images anyway in America. Sekula says, "Our problem, as artists and intellectuals living near but not at the center of a global system of power, will be to help prevent the cancellation of that testimony by more authoritative and official texts." Meaning, it will be our position to try our best to not let the police shape our own reality through the media. And this is where I think Sekula's essay compliments Feldman's. We see another angle of the way our media is managed for us and used to shape us how they want us to be. Placing photography in the context of when it first was getting established helps us see it in a different way, that helps us see why and how the government began tailoring visual images to change our perceptions of reality. It will be our responsibility in the future to actively seek out truth and not just go on believing so easily everything that is 'spoon fed' to us by the government and the media.

The paradigm comes about through the work of Bertillon and Galton who were early pioneers of scientific policing, who began practices that shaped the bureaucratic handling and 'archiving' of visual documents. They represent two attempts to regulate social deviance by means of photography. Bertillon through an immense cataloguing of a person photographic profile, certain measurements, and other information placed on index cards, tried to make a system of identification of criminals, to keep records, look for repeat offenders, etc. Galton's approach in my opinion was a little more strange. He tried through limited exposure and photographic negatives to achieve the definition of a 'criminal type' by placing images that were similar of different people next to each other and looking for common features. Artistically I think this technique was much more beneficial to him. It helped advance the more symbolic approach to photography, capturing more of an essence of a person, what connects and separates us as people, and showing that through a photograph.