Pre-modern traditions gave images complex uses: from medieval insignia, crucial in medieval warfare, to evangelical pedagogy through religious painting inside churches. However, modernity forces us to think about images in a special way. Within the project of consolidating nation-states and the emergence of widespread technification of reality, images are integrated into a novel form of government logistics. Michel Foucault called this set of operations “biopolitics.” For the French philosopher, since the mid-18th century, the political actions of the state, in collusion with the nascent national and intercontinental markets, have focused on channeling the living forces of human beings. This exercise in normalization would colonize entirely new regions of existence such as sexuality, health, and domestic life. The aim was to govern every aspect of our existence in order to enhance the productive forces of the individual and collective body. In this very brief text, we will attempt a very tentative approach to various ways in which part of the biopolitical project had to do with the uses of the image in order to make the gaze a highly rationalized political phenomenon in its behaviors, commercial strategies, and even military implementations.

When we talk about the politics of the image in modernity, it is only natural to think of the nascent societies of the spectacle in the 19th century. With the industrialization of human activities in large modern metropolises came the technification and commercialization of the gaze in the context of emerging leisure cultures. Material transformations such as the advent of public lighting, the concentration of large masses in production centers, and the standardization of schedules according to the factory clock led to the emergence of a new realm of experiences associated with nightlife and the consumption of entertainment. Cinema is the most striking example of this transformation. Authors such as Jonathan Crary have highlighted how research from new disciplines such as experimental psychology and behavioral sciences yielded technical devices that would soon be exploited by the emerging entertainment industry. While these practices demand the attention of anyone who wants to offer a prehistory of our present time, that is not where I want to focus my attention. Beyond spectacle, there are also other political spheres in which the image has established itself as a central instrument.

I am interested in examining the implementation of the image in less obvious yet very familiar scenarios. With the dispersion of someone who glimpses their object of study with the informality of a passerby, I would like to address the way in which images have been integrated from the late 18th century to the present day into the different ways in which we perceive reality. That is, ways in which images become vehicles for a certain understanding of the world and, consequently, tools for acting upon it. Modernity has been responsible for making images not only representations of the world, but also, and above all, tools for its transformation. It is said that images represent the world. I start from a different premise: rather, they act upon it, undoubtedly in very diverse ways. As Deleuze and Guattari insist: “Every copy creates its model and drags it along with it.” Far from imitating, images shape reality. Without attempting to offer a general theory on the subject, I seek to construct a constellation of phenomena in order to reveal resonances between different forms of images and their uses, and to shed some light on their capacity for action on the world in which we live.

A good starting point for this discussion is the mandatory use of images in botanical expeditions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As is well known, the great explorers who traveled through the American colonies in search of unknown vegetation required expert painters. Part of the objective of these expeditions was to obtain these images. It was not enough to collect leaves, seeds, and roots. Illustrated images of plants would facilitate the transport of native vegetation without risk of contamination or degradation. Botanical materials could not be incorporated into scientific publications or botanical museums with the same ease and durability as an image. In other words, images allowed nature to be appropriated and accumulated as part of the king's spoils. By becoming images, vegetation became a currency of exchange. This type of illustration anticipated what would become the fate of photography in the mid-19th century.

This clarity rightly calls for recognition of the active role of the illustrator in the construction of botanical knowledge about nature. He responded to the joint requests of the scientists who guided his work and who, in turn, had to satisfy the colonial institutions eager for new plant and pharmaceutical commodities. While botanists classified and named plants according to the taxonomic knowledge of their time, illustrators idealized their subjects by refining them in images in an exercise of visual abstraction of nature. Plants were never portrayed in their context. Leaves, seeds, and roots were always isolated from their world and arranged in a way that was ideal for the specialized observer. The vegetation was posed in the image, thereby modeling a docile version of the nature of the new world. Plants and their parts were subjected, through their illustrated presentation, to scientific knowledge and the pharmaceutical market. More than a representation of the world, these images were the result of the projection of an entire system of thought that ran transversally from the king to the illustrator. Botanical images made it possible to construct an entire visual archive that could be manipulated for the benefit of scientific knowledge and, above all, for the construction of a new market niche. The image does not represent nature, but rather constructs it as an object of knowledge and exchange. Beyond the mirror, the image is a tool, in this case a colonial instrument.

Following similar patterns, we could identify many state and institutional archives, both public and private, in which images have operated in more recent contexts as a resource for directly intervening in reality. With the technification of the photographic image, with the production of portraits and their serial reproduction, the image would spontaneously find a new use value in institutional repositories. Just a century after the botanical expeditions in the Americas, several European capital cities saw the birth of hundreds of prison, psychiatric, and school photographic archives. The photographic document, more specifically the institutional portrait, would operate as a resource for registering the population in order to normalize their behavior. In a way that was novel for the time, the photographic record of each individual became a matter of state. The new photographic technology very quickly became a tool with mandatory budget allocation in the emerging institutions of social control. In addition, the allocation of space for the construction of general archives for the new documentation became commonplace. It was no longer a question of botanical illustrations, but of photographic portraits archived and catalogued to make the population identifiable and traceable. Many private institutions such as hospitals, schools, and even clubs followed this model.

It is important to note that in both cases, botanical illustrations and institutional portrait photography, the rhetoric of image neutrality has served as a guarantee of the veracity of the images and, consequently, of the effectiveness of their implementation. Whether the faithful image guarantees a “true science” and thus a reliable pharmaceutical product, or whether a well-captured photograph ensures the traceability of individuals, the presumed realism of the image is invoked. In particular, the photographic portrait image responds to a whole series of recording protocols: white background, frontal view of the face, focus on the triangle of the nose, and no additional elements to the individual within the frame. These rules of composition are said to guarantee the neutrality of the record. This cleanliness of the frame supports the legal scientific nature of photography in a similar way to how the supposed realism of botanical illustration ensures the positive rigor of the image. Just as plants were extracted from their habitat to pose for the illustrator, individuals pose for the camera in an abstracted space. The hypothetical neutrality is nothing more than the product of calculation for the pose. Just as they pose, nature and the human face become objects of knowledge and control. In the first case, it was a matter of plant taxonomy; in the second, an archive with police and legal potential. In both cases, through different means and with dissimilar ends, the image archive became an apparatus for action on the plant and human worlds.

Today we are faced with countless images that serve surveillance and traceability functions. Just think of the incorporation of cameras in World War I warplanes to see this. At that time, aviation did not have the power to carry large loads. For this reason, bombers did not yet exist. However, the implementation of cameras in these light aircraft was quickly understood as a war strategy, to the point where entire fleets of planes were sent to fly below the clouds and record enemy camps from the sky. An aerial photograph was worth sacrificing the life of a pilot and the structure of a plane or two. Here, it is clear that an image is a weapon.

It would be worth pausing to consider today, in the context of images captured by drones, those unmanned and remotely controlled vehicles, the ways in which images are integrated into the logistics of tracking individual and collective behavior. Drones, like aerial photography and satellite imagery, offer a non-human view of space. The bird's-eye view of their recordings turns space into a map and concrete phenomena into coordinates. The merit of drones lies in the technical scientific nature of their gaze. The aerial view guarantees a complete study for the control of space and the bodies that inhabit it. With these images, although far removed from the human perspective, we find another type of topographical realism thanks to which space becomes a territory for tracking and quantifying positions and movements. Whether implemented in certain sports practices with the aim of transforming the competitor's performance into statistics or in Afghanistan prior to a bombing, the distant image integrates perfectly with what Paul Virilio called a Logistics of the Gaze.

I would like to gather a series of considerations based on this spontaneous journey oscillating between the distant past, the more recent past, and the present. Firstly, I would like to insist on the idea that images, far from existing as mirrors that represent reality, are tools that operate on it. Furthermore, this implies that their capacity for action on the world is not limited to guiding the desire of the viewing public in the context of today's leisure and entertainment societies. Images are not just symbols. They are integrated into exercises of tracking and domination that go far beyond the narrow framework of television, film, and social media. They are endowed with an effective capacity for action by integrating themselves into various devices for tracking, registering, surveilling, and quantifying individual and collective bodies. Finally, I would like to point out that scientific observation, the logistics of control, quantification for the market, and even aesthetic delight are intertwined in a complex and strategic amalgam.

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