Centering on a variety of the "wanted" image and its socio-political lives, the panel is mainly situated in three scholarly contexts. First, in line with the increasing scholarly recognition and problematization of the image as central to the production of legitimacy, aesthetics and order (Young, 2013;Ward, 2016), the panel offers a critical engagement with visual criminology, the emerging field at the intersection of literary culture, art history, criminology, law, anthropology/sociology of violence, and media studies. The panel marks a drive to rethink both visuality and criminality by bringing in the “social” to debunk any claims for the autonomy of body-images. Second, the panel speaks to the growing upsurge of critical interest in literary and art histories, cultures, and aesthetics of violence, terror, and enemy-making (Toal 2016; Eide 2019). Yet, the panel seeks to demystify not the recourse to violence per se, but rather the larger mode of functioning and its everyday penetration that makes this kind of violence inevitable, as it is legitimated through images and imagemaking. Thus, its aim is also to explore the intertwined violence and visibility vis-à-vis identity formation, as a potential response to the question of “what it means to be human”. Third, the panel locates itself in dialogue with lively theoretical debates about body, corporeality, and transgression (Richardson 2010; Reyes 2014). The panel includes examples across photography, film, art, and new media, yet at the core of all papers still lies the quest to show what these have in common when produced and experienced in connection with the “criminalization” of human bodies. Each presentation (no longer than 14min) offers a perspective from which to reflect on the construction, imposition, and negotiation of adversarial forms of knowledge and dichotomous forms of identity within the contested visual cultures.
Lauren Kuryloski’s paper recognizes mugshots and portraits as two kinds of crime photography that at once share similar technical composition and yet are positioned at opposite ends of a spectrum in regard to respectability and artistic integrity. She examines a series of images that trouble the boundaries between dehumanizing documentation intended to serve the larger criminal justice system, and portraiture that idealizes the sitter, often at the risk of romanticizing violent offenders. Kuryloski turns to cases like the infamous 1928 photograph of murderess Ruth Snyder’s electrocution, Weegee’s 1940s portrait-style images of convicted criminals, and Richard Avedon’s formal portraits of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock in 1960. She shows how these images challenge the binary constructions of criminal and victim, as well as high-culture aspirations and low-brow sensationalism.
Also engaging with crime photography, Aaron Tucker focuses on the facial recognition software (FRS) and specifically relates it to Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” and Agamben’s critique of the state’s ways of turning “humanity itself [into] a dangerous class”. Reading closely photos from the NIST Special 18 Mugshot Identification Database, Tucker makes a two-fold argument: often under the guise of “objective science” and “public health,” the production and processing of such criminal portraiture is never objective and fundamentally artificial; it has to do with an assumption that population must be controlled and monitored in order to enact governmentality. Grounded in the 19th-century practices of phrenology, physiognomy, eugenics and signaletics, Tucker’s examination of the Special 18 Mugshot Identification Database is also in line with Joy Buolowini’s concept of the “coded gaze” from Gender Shades project.
Maurice Evers’s paper traces the policed iconography of assassinated rapper Tupac Shakur in the context of new materialism to show how such extant images become rhetorical and consequential, especially when deployed for the political purposes of criminalizing, policing and disciplining black (male) bodies. Evers theorizes black masculine iconography as figuring in and shaping formal policymaking in the American policy state, in relation to legislative sanctions. Rather than privilege culture and representation over material and somatic realties, Evers’s paper suggests that hegemonic representations of black masculinity produce and govern the political materiality of black masculine bodies. Moreover, the paper contextualizes Tupac against President Clinton’s 1994 federal crime bill, to argue that Tupac’s iconography would be used to rhetorically justify the political advancement of national wars against inner city crime, specifically gang culture and so-called “black-on-black crime.
Echoing and also differing from Evers’s paper concerning racial violence, Belinda He tackles the issue of “criminalizing” as violence enacted by a singular and overarching system of partitioning coded in “class”. Identifying who was “inside” and who was “outside” of the people was a matter of intense visibility at the core of Maoist class struggle. Much emphasis has been given to either the violent components of “class war” or class struggle as a project defined by spectacularity. He’s paper points to the intersection of both, class struggle as spectacular violence and spectatorial violence that remains underexplored. It examines the criminalization of two categories of class enemies (landlords, counter-revolutionaries) through cinema. Focusing on the role of enemies’ looks, faces, masks, and bodies, Belinda unpacks the anti-disguise rhetoric that saturated the revolutionary audiovisual culture of class exorcism and suggest that unmasking did conceal more than reveal.
Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to the “social imaginary of justice”, all presentations (followed by 15-min unstructured discussion) aim to theorize image and criminality, body and technology – as well as broader inquiries into ethics, social order, political legitimacy, and human condition - as mutually constitutive and dynamically intertwined.