Photography and Policing, a Special Issue of History of Photography

Abstract

Over the more than two-year course of developing and finalising this special issue, we have steadily considered the valences of Lorena Rizzo’s 2013 epigrammatic characterisation of police photography’s cultural force, in its power to both invite and hold our attention by its generic sensational verve – we are captivated – and, in the same instant, and not seldom as a function of the latter, to punitively frame the limits of our critical inquiry if not indeed our liberty – we are made captive. Only now that all articles are assembled and the issue is ready for press does a third valence fully assert itself: ‘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 autoexonerating ‘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. 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. It is our hope, in this issue, to pry open some photographic instances – from Dublin, Seychelles and Mauritius, Paris and Tehran in the nineteenth century, to Bombay, Guatemala City, Kansas City and New Jersey, in the twentieth century, to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Los Angeles in the twenty-first century – so that we might better understand the logic of the complex events these images aspire to distil. Our aim is to better understand the dynamics of these two seemingly kindred and conjoined technological, political and historical formations – police and photography. We were often reminded by colleagues in the period of this project’s development that it was a timely one. The political stakes of reflecting on policing as Emails for correspondence: z.gursel@rutgers.edu, jehill@udel.edu