David Houston Jones, "Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics" (Routledge, 2022)
The relationship between images and truth has a complicated history. In the Western tradition, the Kantian settlement on aesthetic judgment as detached from external interests gave rise to artistic production of images that were read with epistemic authority. But the advent of modernity has at once shaken this certainty and reinforced it. No sooner than we reckoned with the singular history painting and illustrated magazines, we have landed in a mass-media world where any possible image can and does exist.\nAnd the more we are surrounded by images, the greater claims they make. Photographs are not only routinely used to convey news, they are used to establish what is and isn\u2019t true. The crime scene photograph is now as likely to be used in a court of law as in a newspaper infographic explainer. The artifact is at once the evidentiary carrier of truth and a visualisation used to confirm it. It creates meaning and it argues for it\nVisual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics\xa0(Routledge, 2022) bridges practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example, in performance and installation art, or photography. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence.\nDavid Houston Jones speaks to Pierre d\u2019Alancaisez about the evidentiary and forensic burden of art and photography, the artifice of crime imaging, the visual traces of data, and the ontology of data and objects.\n\nAngela Strassheim\u2019s\xa0Evidence\n\n\nMelanie Pullen\u2019s\xa0Crime Scenes,\xa0Hugo\u2019s Camera\n\n\nThe\xa0death\xa0of Alan Kurdi and Ai WeiWei\u2019s\xa0restaging\xa0of the scene\n\nKathryn Smith\u2019s\xa0Incident Room: Jacoba \u2018Bubbles\u2019 Shroeder, 1949-2012\n\nLuc Delahaye\n\nHorace Vernet\n\nTrevor Paglen\u2019s\xa0Autonomy Cube\n\n\nLaura Poitras\u2019\xa0Citizenfour\n\n\nJulian Charri\xe8re\u2019s\xa0Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, 2013\n\nSimon Norkfolk\u2019s\xa0When I am Laid in Earth\n\n\nCory Arcangel\u2019s\xa0Data Diaries, 2003\n\nInterview with Eyal Weizmann and Matthew Keenan on\xa0Forensic Aesthetics\xa0and the practice of\xa0Forensic Architecture\n\n\nJosef Mengele\u2019s bones\xa0used in forensic identification\n\n\n\nForensic Architecture\u2018s\xa0investigations\n\n\nInterview with Toby Green and Thomas Fazi on\xa0The Covid Consensus.\n\n\nDavid Houston Jones\xa0is Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter.\nPierre d\u2019Alancaisez\xa0is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law