In the nineteenth century, as today, social outcasts and those whose political beliefs made them criminals were subjects of both fear and fascination for the public at large. In various hands and at different times, photographs of such individuals functioned as evidence, propaganda, and identification of differences from the norm.

The small, card-mounted photographs taken by Louis H. Heller of the defeated leaders of the Modoc Indian War of 1872-73 were sold in the San Francisco gallery owned by photographer Carleton Watkins and depicted an ambiguous victory over the so-called "savages." Pictures of the dead Parisian Communards of 187071 were made to satisfy the government that the Communards had opposed. Photographs depicting the "barbarity" of Asian people especially the "exotic" customs of beheadings and physical torture encouraged the belief that the European powers were morally superior to their colonial subjects.

Early twentieth-century intellectuals romanticized the social outcast as belonging to a special class or race. Photographs of these outsiders were prized and published in the popular "police" magazines. Eugène Atget, whom the Surrealists embraced as a "naïve" artist, and whose ambiguous photographs of deserted areas in Paris were said to resemble crime-scene pictures, was hired to photograph prostitutes. The novelist and poet Pierre Mac Orlan included some of these pictures in his copy of Cesare Lombroso's 1896 publication, La Femme criminelle e la prostituée (The Criminal Woman and the Prostitute).