Seeing things: Violence, voyeurism and the camera

Published date01 May 2014
Date01 May 2014
DOI10.1177/1362480613508425
AuthorEamonn Carrabine
Subject MatterArticles
Theoretical Criminology
2014, Vol. 18(2) 134 –158
© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1362480613508425
tcr.sagepub.com
Seeing things: Violence,
voyeurism and the camera
Eamonn Carrabine
University of Essex, UK
Abstract
In increasingly mediatized cultures it is essential that criminologists develop more
sophisticated understandings of the power of images and this article offers such an
approach. It begins by setting out some of the relationships between photography and
criminology as they have evolved over time to enable a richer understanding of how
the modern criminal subject is constructed and how archival practices have a significant
bearing on how meanings are organized. The second section develops these arguments
by focusing on the controversies generated by four images that are among the most
astonishing documents to have survived Auschwitz, providing visual evidence of the
‘crime of crimes’. In the final section the distinctive problems posed whenever images of
horrific events are re-presented in artistic contexts are confronted in an effort to build
a more critically engaged visual criminology.
Keywords
Culture, ethics, genocide, history of criminology, representation
Ever since the birth of the camera it has been accused of upsetting the divide between
public worlds and private selves, transforming the very act of looking and giving rise to
a whole series of characterizations of this condition: the society of spectacle, the politics
of representation, the gendered gaze and so forth, are among the more well known.
Indeed, photography was a vital element in the construction of the modern criminal sub-
ject and this article will examine how the dynamics of celebrity, criminality, desire, fame,
trauma and voyeurism continue to shape social practices in significant and
Corresponding author:
Eamonn Carrabine, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ,
UK.
Email: eamonn@essex.ac.uk
508425TCR18210.1177/1362480613508425Theoretical CriminologyCarrabine
research-article2014
Article
Carrabine 135
often disruptive ways. Alongside identifying criminals, photographs are used to establish
evidence, construct crime scenes and as techniques of state surveillance. Yet before the
medium became an integral element of regimes of power, there was a closely related
boom in ‘social and celebrity portraiture amongst the newly emergent urban middle
classes’ (Hargreaves, 2001: 17). Both developments reveal a deep-seated, cultural preoc-
cupation with the human face and what it might signify. At the same time, images of
violence and suffering can often overwhelm us, forcing us to take sides and bear witness
to appalling atrocities—where any response to the ‘photographed moment is bound to be
felt as inadequate’ (Berger, 1972/1980: 43), and it is on the emotions such intolerable
pictures provoke that much of this article will concentrate.
From its invention in 1839 the status of photography as a medium drew from both its
ability to record the truth authentically and to present a radically new way of seeing the
world. Ever since then the relationship between photography and reality has prompted
much debate. This is partly because early photography had its origins in what Walter
Benjamin (1931/1985: 240) calls the ‘arts of the fairground’ and from then photography
moved in two directions simultaneously: first towards the astonishingly real, and second,
through image manipulation towards the fantastic (Kracauer, 1960, cited in Carney,
2010: 20). The former gives rise to the documentary tradition, promising to deliver a
visual record of the way things really are, while the latter is bound up with theatre, won-
der and illusion. In much of the writing on photography there is a persistent tension
between science and art, which oscillates between ‘faith in the objective powers of the
machine and a belief in the subjective, imaginative capabilities of the artist’ (Sekula,
1981: 15). Early proponents of the new technology emphasized the mechanical ability of
the camera to record the truth authentically, while others insisted that photography ought
to be placed among the fine arts—and it still remains the case that art history is the main
route into the debates on the medium.
Nevertheless, it is clear that within 30 years of its invention all the major uses of pho-
tography had become firmly established:
police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopaedic
documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records (often, as with the Indians
in the United States, accompanied by genocide), sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing
(the wrongly named ‘candid camera’): aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.
(Berger, 1978/1980: 52)
These many uses suggest that each has a distinct, if occasionally shared, mode of address
and that these multiple origin points of photography undermine simplistic, linear narra-
tives of how the medium has developed. Generic codes established in one area are bor-
rowed in another, so that scientific depictions of the human face and body (as in
phrenology and physiognomy) inform middle class studio portraiture, ‘as well as
approaches to the anthropology of subject races, the diagnosis of mental disease, or the
identification of criminals’ (Hamilton, 2001: 62). Photography offered new ways of rep-
resenting both individuals and social groups, and in doing so revealed some of the con-
cerns and issues animating the era.

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT