Tyson, Danielle --- "Captive Image: Race, Crime, Photography, Katherine Biber, Routledge-Cavendish, Abingdon, 2007" [2008] CICrimJust 36; (2008) 20(2) Current Issues in Criminal Justice 319
Captive Images: Race, Crime, Photography, Katherie Biber, Routledge-Cavendish, Abingdon, 2007
In 1997, Mundarra Smith, a 19-year-old Aboriginal man, was tried and convicted in the District Court of New South Wales, along with four other youths, for taking part in a bank robbery. A series of photographs were taken by a surveillance camera during the robbery. None of the eight eyewitnesses to the robbery identified Smith’s face in the ‘grainy security photographs’ as one of the culprits (‘the hooded bandit’), and they each described the young men as having a different skin colour (p18). The witnesses were eliminated from the identification process only to be replaced with two police officers who claimed they knew Smith from the Redfern area and, based on their prior knowledge, recognised Smith from the photographs. For three and half years, it was determined on the basis of the police testimony that Smith had been one of the four youths who robbed the bank, before the High Court ruled, ‘upon balance, that he had not’ (p5). Smith’s conviction was quashed, a re-trial was ordered, and he was acquitted by the jury.
Captive Images poses a series of questions around the limits and perils of using photographs ‘to prove something’, and this highly original and compelling work provides a provocative account of what else is imagined in these security photographs. What fantasies are invoked and staged, in the practice of looking at (law’s) images?
Captive Images augments critical scholarship concerning law’s relationship to the image. Biber delivers on her promise to provide a ‘critical and rigorous’ contribution to the ‘jurisprudence of the visual’ (pxi, 5). Law has a long held attachment to the image, yet the modern legal tradition continues to conceal and deny its literary sources and aesthetic arrangements. In order to maintain its self-image as ordered, systematic, coherent and hermeneutically stable, law claims to be immune from influence from other discourses and practices like literature, film and art (Douzinas and Nead 1991; Moran et. al. 2004; Goodrich 1987). This abnegation provides the impetus of this work. In view of law’s long held fascination with, and dependence on, the visual image (photographic evidence) to read both the causes and solutions to crime, from the outset, Captive Images cautions law (and also the reader) ‘against being seduced so willingly by photographs’ (pxi).
In Captive Images Biber asks questions of the law other than those raised by traditional legal practice (‘Can two police officers who know Smith from the streets of an inner-city suburb give evidence that they recognised him in the surveillance images?’). Her close reading of the Mundarra Smith case traces the uses to which the ‘grainy’ surveillance photographs were put, which necessitates ‘an interrogation of a range of texts which exceed those most obviously law-like’ (Puren and Young 1999: 5). In so doing, Biber offers a compelling account of ‘crime, its images and texts, as scenes in the management of national space’ (p8). In law’s mise-en-scène, the hooded bandit in the photograph is cast as the ‘obstacle’ to the white man’s fantasy, who imagines himself in charge of the nation, ‘where money is safe in the bank, where the young show respect for the elderly, where rampaging black men are kept behind bars (p8).
Following the lead of over one hundred years of cultural scholarship on photography, Captive Images begins with a consideration of the evidentiary capacity of photographs. The opening chapter (‘The Hooded Bandit’) focuses on the limits of photography both as a visual medium and a ‘visual confirmation … that associates blackness with deviance’ (p7). This analysis is carried out via an examination of critical texts that confront the notion that the photograph can be said to speak for itself’, that all a photograph requires is a suitably ‘qualified expert’ to ‘read its lips’ (p11). Reading images psychoanalytically, Biber contends, helps ‘to uncover the cultural and juridical practices by which minority individuals and communities are subjected to surveillance, control and incarceration’ (p11).
Captive Images contests law’s claim of possessing an impartial eye in which ‘nothing impede[s] its capacity to see’, and thus rejects the assumption that a photograph is analogous with ‘truth’. (p5). ‘In most cases’, Biber explains:
where a photograph is clear, its evidentiary capacity seems assumed. At Mundarra Smith’s trial and appeals, where the photographs are unclear, instead of scrutinising the place of photographs in the evidentiary canon, the courts devoted all their attention to determining who is permitted to look at and speak about an unclear photographic image (p7).
Whereas a traditional legal approach to the visual image would simply serve to leave the ‘truth-value’ of the photograph intact only to repeat the ‘worn-out struggle between truth and falsity or between image and reality’ (pviii, ix), Captive Images cautions the reader against surrendering ‘unflinchingly to the fantasy that we [can] really know the world from these pictures’ (p7). ‘To look into the photographs in order to find Mundarra Smith’, we are told, ‘is also to look into a space that contains racial difference, criminal conduct, banking, policing and surveillance’ (p7).
Biber continues her exploration of whether photographs simply speak for themselves ‘or are silent’ (p10). Each chapter seeks to ‘disentangle’ and untether law’s ‘unsteady embrace’ between the act of looking and the act of interpretation (p5). Biber illustrates how ‘photographs occupy multiple genres’ (p6). Each chapter traces the various genres to which these visual images belong, focusing on the manifold discourses contained within ‘the scene of representation (the security photograph)’ at ‘the scene of the crime (the bank robbery)’. Proceeding by way of ‘a response; that is, part of a dialogue that is always already taking place, a conversation or exchange with others’ (a reference to Young 1996: 16 in Biber 2007: 11), Chapter Two (‘The national bank’), for example, asks ‘[w]hat does it mean to accuse an Aboriginal man of crimes against property in the context of indigenous claims against a nation built upon stolen land?’ (p7). Biber demonstrates the ‘central role’ played by the surveillance photographs in a ‘nationalist fantasy in which national space is contained, contested and managed’ (p28). This fantasy of the nation centres on the idea of the bank as ‘a site of capital’ that ‘regulates wealth, possession and security on behalf of the nation and its subjects’, and the ‘hero-bandit’ who subverts the fantasy by his imagined acts of deviance and criminality (p27, 38-43). Biber goes on to confirm for us in Chapter Four (‘The danger zone’) how ‘the national fantasy [also] requires a setting, a stage upon which to perform’ (p83). This setting evokes the streets of ‘inner-city Redfern’, a location known to the police who regularly ‘walk’ them looking for trouble’ (p83). It is from ‘that suburb’s delinquent youth, a group whose deviance is as famous as it is endlessly compelling’ that Smith’s role is cast within the mise-en-scène of the robbery (p83). I was particularly drawn to the skilful way Biber weaves into her discussion of these fantasies the figure of ‘the hero-bandit’ as he is represented in a number of Australian documentaries and films about bank-heists to illustrate his ‘enduring, sometimes complex’ role in staging and restaging national identity and national mythology (p38).
Overall, this book succeeds in making an innovative, multi-disciplinary contribution to the rapidly growing fields of study in law and visual images; cultural criminology; masculinity/ies and youth studies, indigenous studies and cultural studies. It’s success lies particularly in the way it makes a complex set of ideas about law’s relationship to images highly accessible to a non-academic audience, and its sophisticated discussion of Australian and United States case law around identification and cross-cultural identifications evidence means it is a must-read for legal and criminal justice professionals alike (eg. legal counsel, judges and police). I would also highly recommend this book to students ‘to demonstrate the concerns of a criminological aesthetics’ (Young 2008:24). This book is one ‘more reason’ why we (above all law) should ‘continue the struggle with the image and imagination: to trace the translation of affect into law, into judgment and punishment’ (p27). Captive Images not only pushes the boundaries of what we already know about photographic evidence; it issues a stark reminder why the practice of looking is fraught with ‘almost limitless potential for danger’ (p71).
Danielle Tyson
Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne
References
Douzinas C & Nead L 1999 Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
Goodrich P 1987 Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis Macmillan Press London
Moran L J Sandon E Loizidou E & Christie I 2004 Law’s Moving Image Routledge Cavendish London
Puren N & Young A 1999 ‘Signifying Justice: Law, Culture and the Questions of Feminism’ Australian Feminist Law Journal Vol 13 3-13
Young A 2008 ‘Culture, Critical Criminology and the Imagination of Crime’ in T Anthony and C Cunneen (eds) The Critical Criminology Companion Hawkins Press Leichhardt