During Korea’s Japanese colonial period, the Japanese Colonial Government produced tens of thousands of glass plate photographs to measure, classify, control, and govern. My ongoing project intervenes in the visual logic of the 38,000 glass plates preserved at the National Museum of Korea. Bodies set against monuments, subjects measured against scale, families arranged by typology. Cropping, rearranging, material decay, and rephotographing break down these systems until the images fail as instruments of knowledge. By performing simple acts attention moves away from the subjects to the apparatus that produces them, revealing how authority is constructed through photography and how that authority can be unsettled within the image itself.