nned, and its incorporation/production of meaning, particularly in terms of gender, in the construction of an adolescent brain characterized by poor emotional control.
The POFA Set : Capturing, Fixing and Representing Emotions with Photography.
The set of Pictures of Facial Affect that Ekman and Friesen developed in the 1970s consists of 110 black-and-white photographic portraits of Caucasian-type men and women performing the facial expression of the six emotions which the authors consider to be universally recognized and expressed : joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise. These portraits, whose function is “simply” to emit or to solicit emotions which are useful in the context of experimental protocols in the neurosciences of the emotions, are nevertheless the product of a history in which the polysemy of images in an iterative relationship between photographs and experts and laymen has produced a univocal cliché.
The historian Ruth Leys points out that when Ekman began studying nonverbal behaviors including facial affect in the 1960s, there was a resurgence of interest in the emotions in the field of psychology following years of neglect, as a result of the work of Ekman’s mentor, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Leys explains that Tomkins, inspired by the Darwinian theory of evolution and cybernetic developments, proposed a new approach to the study of emotions. He put forward the idea that there is a limited number of basic emotions which evolution has defined as the organism’s universal response to the environment : fear, anger, distress, disgust, interest, shame, joy, surprise and contentment. Tomkins described these basic emotions as “discrete” and “connected” and as emotional programs located in the subcortical region of the brain, whose behavioral response and physiological expression, especially facial affects, are unique to each emotion (Leys 2010, p. 67-68).
Research on the expression and the interpretation of emotions was nevertheless ongoing all through the first half of the twentieth century, notably using sets of photographs of the facial affect of emotions as material support for experiments (McClain 2004). If the use of photographs as a tool to represent the emotions in the laboratory was not new when Ekman and Friesen published their Pictures of Facial Affect, the specificity of their photographic set resides in the fact that its images participate not only in a scientific rhetoric of proof or experimental methodology, but they also and above all constitute a black box (Latour 1995) that stabilizes and preserves the principle of the universality of the emotions. Ekman and Friesen’s photos of the facial expression of emotions have incorporated all the theoretical productions connoting them (Barthes 1961), that is to say, they include all the meanings resulting from the work on emotions conducted by these researchers. Through a process of translation and transcription (Latour and Woolgar  1988), the creative and interpretive elements of these images seem to have left room only for the reproduction of the “real”, thus allowing the use of a photograph of a facial expression of emotion to signify the emotion itself.
Now I turn to the dynamic process among researchers, discourses, images, actors and observers that participated in the production of these photographs which offer a relationship of identity with what they signify that goes beyond mere analogy.
The brochure that accompanies the set of Pictures of Facial Affect explains that,
With the aid of the best current technology in lighting and photography, more than a dozen persons were photographed repeatedly while attempting to express one of six emotions. Hundreds of photographs were studied over a period of several years to obtain a series which yielded consistent agreement among viewers about the emotion being expressed. […] Posers were trained to contract or relax different facial muscles associated with various facial expressions. Generally, posers were instructed to activate certain muscles rather than to pose a particular emotion. (Ekman 