Archive and body are inextricably linked when new optical imaging and reproduction technologies emerge in the middle of the 19th century. While a variety of fields and institutions will strengthen their power from the disciplinary use of archive, including individual and social control technologies, it is the medical institution and more specifically the neuropsychiatric clinic where the image will help legitimise practices and impose narratives about the normal and pathological aspects of the body that will transform the epistemological and visual paradigms of modernity. Similarly, in a context of hypervisibility and new mediations, the role of the various actors involved in alterations to the finisequalised medical imaginary is questionable, since images made intramural circulate, proliferate and spread outside the medical environment thanks to new visual mechanical reproduction technologies such as photography and cinema.