An Arab's Head

Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" reminded me of my run-in with the French system of criminals' photographs a few summers ago. I had met a guy at a club whose name was Karim and who was from Algeria. It's been my experience that the easier he is to fetishize, the riskier it is to get involved. In this case I was proved right. He was completely drunk and so I drove his car to my place but never jotted down the license plate number. He might have put something on my drink or maybe I'm just trying to remember it that way so that I am not completely to blame for what happened.

Karim, who showed surprise at my showing surprise over the fact that he wasn't French, said "Look at my Arab head." Which reminded me of the biologization of prejudice against people from Northeastern Brazil. One wouldn't say "so and so looks like this" or "like that" or so so "is" this or that. One would, like Karim, refer to one's "head" as the evidence for one's inferior social status ("flat heads from the Northeast"). By the end of the night we had set a date for the following night and I fell asleep. When I woke up, several of my belongings were gone. And so was Karim and his head (no sexual pun intended). So I walked to the police station to report the crime. "Was he Arab?" was the first question the policeman asked me. Then he said he was going to have to do something very pointless, but that was the law, so he had to do it. This pointless thing was to show me photographs of previously booked criminals on a computer. He didn't even pay attention to my looking at the images, 99-percent of which were "Arab heads". "Can I get these guys' phone numbers? They are hot", I told the policeman. And he laughed, and said he had been at the club where I met Karim (but not because of him, "because of a friend who wanted to go.")

Why did the policeman ask me if the thief was Arab if almost all criminals in the archive was Arab? The "average-ness" conceals the crime, so what was he trying to confirm?

This inheritance of the criminal photographic archive struck me because the policeman announced it as fruitless even before I had a chance to access it and because, all photographs did look alike. I can see, then, the allure (Galton's Bertillon's...) of trying to discover the physical link among these Arab criminal bodies. And the probing and measuring, perhaps akin to the queer assessment of "str8 acting" evidence in online photographs (checking for a lack, a lack of signs of femininity, or "gayness"). And the alikeness -- in the French criminal photographs and in this queer search for seamless hetero-mimicry -- isn't borne out of anything inside the photograph, but out of the looker's own investment.