Photography and Policing, a Special Issue of History of Photography
‘Time and again’ the logic of police photography – the logic of the assemblage police/photography – can only be understood in its distinct and local operational temporalities and repetitions, both in the unfolding and echoing moments of their articulation, and in our historical measure of the same.M...
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| Published in: | History of photography 2021-10, Vol.45 (3-4), p.211-216 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | ‘Time and again’ the logic of police photography – the logic of the assemblage police/photography – can only be understood in its distinct and local operational temporalities and repetitions, both in the unfolding and echoing moments of their articulation, and in our historical measure of the same.Much has been made of policing’s distinctive temporality, its ‘split second’, as it is made an instrument of police work and as it might lend itself to oppositional, ameliorative counter-forensic inquiry. Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller have recently described this brief instant, how it might contain the police officer’s auto-exonerating ‘split-second decision’, or the police or press photographer’s incriminating split-second exposure, as policing’s ‘temporal state of exception’, where nothing can be certain and all is potentially a threat and where, accordingly, the most terrible violations can be judicially sanctioned.Footnote2 As we will so often find in the pages that follow, police photography, from the crime scene photograph to the mug shot to the ‘police beat’ news photograph, is perhaps ontologically anchored in this abbreviated and speculative temporality of the instant, where the medium’s compressed temporal frame is made a feature, wherein everything and everyone is established as suspect and no alibi or reasoned defence might be heard. |
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| ISSN: | 0308-7298 2150-7295 |