De-labeling captured figures.
Résumé
As accurate historians have sufficiently exposed, photographic techniques were more than often improved by (or for) Scientific Police, which, in turn, based and built its “scientific value” on the photographic ability to describe and measure man’s physiognomy, consequently provoking the nearly permanent faith in the self-sufficient evidentiary and objective character of photography, which also popularized the medium. If photography was defined as the first apparatus who could express, retain and fix the human trace (Walter Benjamin referring to Bertillon’s invention of ‘metric’ photography), and it’s still considered as the medium capable “to certify the human presence” (Barthes, Camera Lucida), in visual criminology photographs and mug-shots represent indeed an expressions of the self, by some means becoming extorted confessions, or uncontrolled self-revelatory forms.
In our peculiar epoch, where photographs are more and more entrusted with the task of furthering and expanding the self, we would therefore like to question photography as “self-confession”, by analyzing the work of some artists whose starting point is the mistrusting of images.
I intend to evocate some paradigmatic examples, The Innocents (2003) of the American photographer Taryn Simon in particular. Strongly supporting The Innocence Project (which discloses “disturbing fissures” in the US criminal justice system, such as incentivized informants, improper forensic science, procedural errors, government misconduct, false confessions and inadequate defense, finally denouncing eyewitness misidentification as “the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions”), the Simon’s photographic project displays in texts and images the true stories of some victims of wrongful conviction. The portraiture formula of Simon’s photographs brings to light the problematical relationship between photographic truth and photographic fiction, that the author highlight by showing the pseudo-evidence not merely involved in photo array procedures, sketches, live lineups and rogue’s galleries, but in every single portrait, in every mise en scène of a “guilty person”.