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Havoc in Heaven / 大鬧天宮 (1964)

My tags got too long again. Had this in drafts (vibing on progesterone and thinking about masks/mischief and nineteenth-century state paradigms of control/deviance) but I came across this same photo in the wild (research) a couple weeks ago.

She was a ("suspected") sex worker. The original photo includes a hand-written note, dating it 11 October 1874 and naming her as "de Beyren (La Comtesse)." It was a self-promotional portrait she had taken before it ended up as File 329 in the "Register of the Ladies Galantes" (BB1 registry) of the Paris police division known as "Service of Morals" (Cabinet of the Prefect, 1st Division, 2nd Office, Service des Mœurs).

Collected between 1861 and 1874, "moral agents" kept the register to track the "perversion" and "insubordination" of 415 sex workers of Paris. The police describe the women they're tracking as "insoumises"--rebellious, insubordinate, unruly. Among the 415 women, the files include portraits of 143. Most of the photos were originally commissioned by the workers themselves, as promotions and advertisements for their dances/performances/services, before they were co-opted by the police.

Police photography became an essential tool/method by the 1890s of Pinkerton agents, counter-revolutionary and surveillance departments, US police forces tracking Black residents and union workers, British/German/French officials monitoring "crime," and US military officials tracking anticolonial dissidents in the Philippines. But state use of photography to monitor transgression was being experimented with on the sex workers of Paris earlier, in the 1860s. (Notably, the police's fear in response to dissent after the rebellious fervor of the Paris Commune of 1871 may have influenced the state/police to pursue the use of photos like this.)

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A historian in a 2006 text analyzed some written records of the BB1 files, though it apparently remained difficult to encounter the photos of the women outside of limited museum/gallery exhibitions.

But Clara Bouveresse had a nice article synthesizing both, from 2024 (which includes plenty of the photos, including that of the anonymous La Comtesse de Beyren; while the Countess chose to withhold her name, most of the women attached their names to their portraits): Clara Bouveresse, "From advertising promotion to police surveillance: Photographs of courtesans (1861-1874)," Clio. Women, Genre, History, Vol. 1, no. 59 (2024), pages 207-231.

Bouveresse describes the deliberate play with and manipulation of image, representation, and expectation by the sex workers, a "subversion of bourgeois codes" through the staging of imagery; the rising affordability of circulated print material among audiences; and the police's simultaneous vilification of yet fascination with "vice," an "oscillation between seduction, curiosity, and moral condemnation." (More context: Portraiture circulation corresponds to Victorian-era rise of "celebrity" concept and print marketing, though predates the 1880s/1890s, when cococttes/sex work may have been more-visibly the object of Parisian discourses of repulsion/fascination/"modernity" amidst suffrage/labor campaigns and the opening of cabarets/Le Chat Noire.) She describes the police confounded with insoumises: "Not inserted, they escape official surveillance." But she also uses the files to acknowledge the rise of photography as a utility of policing.

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So-called "police photography" later became a central/critical tool of US, British, and French police/surveillance institutions in both colonial and metropolitan settings at the turn of the century and in earlier twentieth century. (Think: Pinkertons, Chicago cops of the 1890s, tracking transnational "radicals" in Europe, workplace strikes, President McKinley's end.) Photography was also essential to the other central/critical tool of policing at that time: the also-originating-in-France "Bertillon System."

This "bertillonage," developed by Alphonse Bertillon (yuuup, he was a Paris police officer), was interested in categorizing/taxonomizing bodies ("anthropometry," body-measuring), and depended on photos to track subjects/"offenders" by identifying their bodily features. Basically, akin to mugshots. From this, the notion of the "filing cabinet" as a tool of state power is also strengthened.

The Bertillon System became widespread in practice in US/Europe in the 1890s. Same time that police photography/filing cabinets did, too. What else became popular tool in the 1890s? Fingerprinting.

British official William Herschel developed and then popularized fingerprinting among police. Herschel first experimented it while he was a colonial officer in India; in 1858, he made a local contractor imprint his hand on a legal contract. In 1877, as magistrate in India, he required recipients of government funds to provide fingerprints. In 1880, in the journal Nature, he called fingerprinting a "weapon of penetrating certainty." He sent copies of his experiments to Francis Galton, fellow Brit and infamous "founder of eugenics."

It came full circle: Galton got really into anthropemetry and body-classification (he was Charles Darwin's cousin, after all) and, as Bouveresse importantly points out in her article, Galton saw the potential of photography, too. He developed the method of "composite portrait" to "categorize" people as "types."

In 1882, the Paris police officially adopted the Bertillon System, followed by US police in 1887.

(I'm thinking again of Ravi Sundaram's e-flux article, where he cites Taussig's description of Herschel, who Taussig says was influenced by "a colonial administration dependent on writing and signatures" which had a "fear of massive fraud" and dissent, so "British administrators unable to discern ... Indian subjects ('they all look the same')" turned fingerprinting into "a type of modernizing sorcery by the colonial bureacracy." But we might add police photography to this modernizing magic. Sundaram acknowledges this: "Allan Sekula once wrote that the central innovation of nineteenth-century police photography was not the camera but the filing cabinet." Maybe so! Both the fingerprint and the photograph, these forms of body measurement and surveillance, collected together in the filing cabinet. Bouveresse, to her credit, in this article, also cites Sekula, who wrote in 1986: "Bertillon sought to blend the image in the archive, where Galton undertakes to blend the archive into photography.")

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The Countess and her "insubordinate" colleagues were early subjects (victims) of this trend.

If the 1880s/1890s saw the rise and institutionalization of fingerprinting, police photography, and filing cabinets, then it's notable that French police were already systematically practicing this shit on women in the 1860s/1870s.

Bouveresse acknowledges the potential significance of widespread rebelliousness after which Paris police formalized their photography project among sex workers and beyond: "In the BB1 register, the presence of photographs does not yet have an official or explicit utility function. It seems to be part of the administrative zeal, the taste for collection [...]. At that time, many police officer felt that they knew the populations under their control [...]. The year of the Commune of Paris, in 1871, marks a turning point. [...] Photographs of accused people began to be produced methodically by maritime prefectures and military courts."

(Also: In 1871, the same year as the Commune, the French nation-state also lost the Franco-Prussian War, in which the victor re-established itself as the German Empire, potentially contributing more anxiety to French police/institutions.)

Bouveresee notes that between 1874 and 1882 (the year that the Bertillon System was officially adopted by the institution), Parisian police had already collected 75,000 portraits.

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The "Register of Convictions for Morals" (the BB3 registry) from the same Service of Morals appears like a taxonomy, a field guide, a textbook. Pages are bifurcated down the middle: Text documenting "crimes" on one side, and photos of the unclothed women on the other side.

Like a "scientific" cataloguing of people, reduced to state intelligibility as mere "criminals."

Alongside the Countess in the files is "Alice la Provencale," a "former public ball dancer," pictured smiling while lacing (unlacing?) her boots, and whom the police say engaged in the "vices" of "lubricity" and "homosexuality."

I like the photo of "Emma Brach" (1 February 1873, File 116), who is rolling her eyes as she sits atop a desk, one leg raised, displaying her leather boot.

Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.

—Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves

I challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic [emphasis mine], and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this “good” work. This sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed. [emphasis mine]

& further down:

By the very nature of librarianship being an institution, it privileges those who fall within the status quo. Therefore librarians who do exist outside librarianship’s center can often more clearly see the disparities between the espoused values and the reality of library work. But because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution [emphasis mine], when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased. Recently, Lesley Williams of Evanston, Illinois, made headlines for being fired from her library due to comments (on her personal social media accounts), illustrating the hypocritical actions of her library in regards to the lack of equitable access to information. Although she was advocating for the core library value of equitable access, similar to that of the “Connecticut Four,” her actions were regarded as unprofessional.

Ironically, this focus on the way-s in which librarians et al are “victimised” by our professional context, while disregarding the aspect of “vocational awe” which is meant to critique all the ways in which members of “vocational” professions will close ranks & lock shields against any kind of analysis that does not accept those institutions as always-already perfect, could be considered an example of vocational awe!

If libraries are sacred spaces, then it stands to reason that its workers are priests. As detailed above, the earliest librarians were also priests and viewed their work as a service to God and their fellow man. Out of five hundred librarians surveyed, ninety-five percent said the service orientation of the profession motivated them to become librarians. Another study found that the satisfaction derived by serving people is what new librarians thrive on. Similarly, many Christians describe their religious faith as “serving God,” and to do so requires a life spent in service. Christians often reference Mark 10:45 to describe the gravity of a call to service: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Considering their conjoined history, it should come as no surprise that librarians, just like monks and priests, are often imagined as nobly impoverished as they work selflessly for the community and God’s sake.

We are advocating for ourselves & our rights as workers while emphasising, ceaselessly & with great insistence, all the “selfless” ways in which we “serve” our community & how our “self-sacrificing” “passion” for our “mission” makes us “easy to exploit”. We are not advocating for ourselves by pointing out that a library is just a workplace, that being a librarian is just a job, & that if my cousin who works at an insurance company isn’t expected to buy work materials with her own money, to put in unpaid overtime as a matter of course, to accept that her vacation days are basically a fiction, to see her duties inflate constantly with no acknowledgment or compensation, to cobble together part-time positions for the whole of her career, etc, then it shouldn’t be expected of us either & really shouldn’t be expected of anyone. We are not deconstructing the outlooks that underlie vocational awe, we are reifying them.

What makes us “worthy” of advocacy & of protection are, specifically, our willingness to “sacrifice” ourselves for others & for the “good” of the community. This marks us as “exceptional”, “different” from “other” workers who are “different” from us because they are not motivated by “passion” (which like, for “passion” read “vocation”), & makes us unable to identify all the points of contact between our experiences on the job & that of a lot of other people in service positions. Our experiences of “exploitation” (quotes here because good gd, we do in fact have a white-collar job indoors & I think there is something a little obscene sometimes about the ways in which our profession discusses our issues when our offices are cleaned by like undocumented women of colour to whom most of us never even talk & with whom most of us feel no particular solidarity as workers) are not unique & are in fact common across many public-facing industries such as food service or retail - would you believe me if I told you how much overlap there is between my professional experiences as a librarian & that of friends who work the floor at Starbucks or at Aldi? A lot of the manipulative & coercive tactics their bosses use to make them accept job creep, excessive & haphazard scheduling, danger on the job, overmonitoring & micromanagement, but also the pressures they encounter when they take sick days or vacation days, etc are carbon copies of what I’ve seen happen to me & others within libraries. Bosses are bosses are bosses, whether your profession is one that is typically treated as a “vocation” within public discourse or not; it is not true that the ways in which we are mistreated are completely & wholly unique to us. When we accept this framing, we are essentially positioning librarianship as “set apart” from other professions, libraries as completely distinct from any other type of workplace & as wholly unique among them, & ourselves as essentially different from other workers, in exactly the way that “vocational awe” as a concept intends to critique!

As I mentioned earlier, vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. But creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. If the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession. Those who are unable to work for free due to financial instability are then forced to either take out loans to cover expenses accrued or switch careers entirely. Librarians with a lot of family responsibilities are unable to work long nights and weekends. Librarians with disabilities are unable to make librarianship a whole-self career.

We are reinforcing those norms when we focus exclusively on how much we sacrifice for our communities & how “passionate” we are about our jobs as the primary reason why our communities should care about what happens to us - when the reality is, what would actually help us is an ability to see & recognise all the ways in which we are not unique, in which even within industries that are not identified as relying on “altruism” & “creativity” (which like, if you think there’s no altruism or creativity in working retail or in like industrial soldering or whatever I’ve got news for you, but that’s a different topic - who is marked as having a “creative” or “altruistic” job in our discourse? why is the power plant maintenance worker who gets up time & time again in the middle of the night to solve complex, urgent industrial problems with no standard solutions, using his hands & his intellect & his imagination, & this so that people will have continuous uninterrupted access to electricity, not considered to have a “creative” or “altruistic” profession within those discussions?), workers are exploited in ways that will be familiar & recognisable to us. We cannot use vocational awe as a conceptual delimiter between professions because that actually defeats the purpose of vocational awe as a framework. We are accepting & perpetuating the idea that we are markedly & measurably “different” from other workers, & we render ourselves unable to analyse the institutions we are a part of as perfectible structures which are not ontologically good or even ontologically different from other workplaces but which are, rather, just workplaces, with bosses & employees, & where exploitation will occur along lines and through tactics that are familiar to many, many people across a whole gamut of professions.

I think the essential conclusion is this quote:

It is no accident that librarianship is dominated by white women. Not only were white woman assumed to have the innate characteristics necessary to be effective library workers due to their true womanhood, characteristics which include missionary-mindedness, servility, and altruism and spiritual superiority and piety, but libraries have continually been “complicit in the production and maintenance of white privilege.” These white women librarians in public libraries during the turn-of-the-century U.S. participated in selective immigrant assimilation and Americanization programs, projects “whose purpose was to inculcate European ethnics into whiteness”.

Hey it’s my friend Charlotte’s birthday! She is a disabled trans woman who has been surviving through homelessness, cancer, hate crimes, and chronic illness, for another year! Please help me show her some kindness and support today so she can keep paying for her motel, meds, and food for her and her dog. Thanks!

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