Our modern understanding of institutional identity began with police photography, and the building of Habitual Criminal Registers. These databases participated in building the social ‘archive’, were deployed to prevent recidivism, and developed in the context of evolving interest statistical knowledge systems, as well as biological fatalism in criminology and anthropology. The ‘mechanical objectivity’ of the camera, social, political, and intellectual influences, meant images and the archive were a new way of ‘knowing’ people, especially criminals, deviants, and other undesirables. Shortly after the institutional adoption of photographic registers, other technologies too were needed to make those registers searchable. This provoked the first anthropometrics and biometrics systems, and the first exercises in reducing identity to numerical data.