Fotoreproductie van zes portretten van Siciliaanse brigards door Giuseppe Incorpora, verkleind 1887 - 1888

This is a photographic reproduction of six portraits of Sicilian brigands by Giuseppe Incorpora, remade by Marinus Pieter Filbri. It’s a copy of a copy, and that fact alerts us to the social function of photography at the time. Consider the material: the image is printed on a card, a format developed in the mid-19th century. These “carte de visite” were cheap to produce, using a multiple-lens camera, so many copies could be made from a single sitting. They democratized portraiture and provided a kind of social media for the Victorian era. But there’s a darker side here. The photographic process was used to create a visual record of marginalized people. It was a tool of social control, used to document, categorize, and thus contain those deemed outside the norm. This challenges our notions of photography as objective truth. Instead, the images become artifacts of power. They invite us to reflect on the lives and circumstances of these men.