Text The obsession with classification and categorization inherent in image analysis software follows a long tradition of authoritarian nation states to count classify and evaluate the bodies their populations are made of Images and above all photographs

The obsession with classification and categorization inherent in image analysis software follows a long tradition of authoritarian nation states to count, classify and evaluate the bodies their populations are made of. Images (and above all photographs) of those bodies have hereby served historically to map out the abnormal against the normal, to construct the other against the aligned subject. The pervert, the criminal, the Jewish, the colonized, the racial and sexual other have been dragged into the light of the sovereign's camera, banned on paper, their skulls measured, their eyes read, their body parts examined in an insatiable fascination with and tremendous fear of the unknown. In order to construct the normal (heterosexual, white, European, male) subject as the norm, everybody else had to be neatly classified into different sub-categories of abnormal. Image analysis software picks up these threads and spins a new chapter in the story of body-classification techniques.