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Chapter contents. Ronnie Lippens. Introduction. Contextualizing visual criminological research
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CHAPTER CONTENTS
· Introduction 434
· Contextualizing Visual Criminological Research 434
· The Visual Turn in the Social Sciences 437
· Visual Criminology 439
· Experiencing and Using Images 442
¡ Making sense of images 443
¡ Images as useful research tools 446
· Images of Justice, Law and Order 447
· Summary and Review 450
· Study Questions and Activities for Students 450
· Suggestions for Further Reading 451
· References 451
GLOSSARY TERMS
visual turn experience
visual criminology semiotics
USING VISUAL METHODS IN CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH
RonnIe LIppens
INTRODUCTION
This chapter commences with a discussion about a painting. This is used as a segue into explaining why ‘the visual’ has emerged, during the last few decades, as one of the more salient themes in the social sciences, including criminology. The main body of the chapter explores how criminologists and criminological research have been impacted by this ‘visual turn’, leading to the formation of what has become known as visual criminology. Reflections on visual methodology and on the importance of ‘experience’ in visual research are threaded throughout. In the final sections, the chapter will focus on the importance of images of, broadly speaking, justice, law and order in criminology and in criminological research.
CONTEXTUALIZING VISUAL CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH
The Koestler Trust is a charity that supports prisoners who wish to engage in the arts, including visual arts such as painting. The Trust has a website at www. koestlertrust. org. uk. Funded by a variety of national arts councils and offender rehabilitation organizations, the Trust uses artistic mentoring of prisoners and detainees broadly as a rehabilitative strategy. The Trust regularly organizes artistic exhibitions and awards prizes for outstanding work. The overall idea and guiding principle is that by being creative, and by transforming his outlook onto the world in an artistic way, the pris- oner will also create himself (or herself, of course; henceforth one or the other) anew and transform or, indeed, reform his own self in the process, and therefore also, at least potentially, the character of his future life choices. On one such an award occa- sion, a prisoner submitted the painting pictured in Figure 19. 1.
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The artist himself said that the painting represents Tom Daley, the Olympian, and that he painted it because he sympathised with the diver at a time when he (i. e. Daley) had to endure constant slurs on social media following his ‘coming out’ about his sexuality.
It is, however, hard not to sense (the use of this word is significant, as we shall see) that there might be more to the picture than just the representation of a well-known Olympic diver. Notice, for example, that the painter chose to paint Daley at the point when he had already broken the surface of the water and not, as one would perhaps have expected of a painting of a diver, during the full free fall of the dive itself. This is quite significant. What happens under water is the one thing that we, as spectators, can only guess at. During the fall itself, the diver’s destination is, all his movements notwithstanding, fixed. Gravity will make certain that the only way for the diver to go is downwards. The diver, during the fall, is at the complete mercy of the law of physics and is, ultimately, incapable of doing anything about this.
FIgure 19. 1 ‘Coming up for Air’
Source: HMP Whitemoor, Koestler Awards 2013, Ariadne Bimberg Highly Commended Award for Oil or Acrylic. Courtesy of the Koestler Trust
Once in the water though, the diver gradually gains more freedom of movement. At first, movements are still hampered by what it seems is the memory of the gravity that came with the fall (do note how the painter has captured this ‘memory’ with the whitish expanse of air bubbles in Daley’s wake). But soon there will be a point when the diver will be able to get a grip, so to speak, and regain a measure of control not just over his own movements, but also over the direction of travel (upwards! ) and the path to take. It is worth noting that the painting was given the title Coming up for Air. See how the glimmering light at the surface (in the top-left corner of the paint- ing) seems to be beckoning the diver. Of all the moments in a dive this is the exact one that was chosen by the painter. You could now ask yourself, why did the painter choose this moment? What went through the painter’s mind when he was staring at the blank canvas? What was he visualizing in his mind’s eye? Why? Would this have been a completely deliberate, conscious decision? Or would there have been subcon- scious motivations at play as well?
The painter himself may not necessarily know the answer to this question. It could
very well be that the choice was made, by the painter, at a subconscious level.
He may just have woken up one day saying to himself ‘I’ll just paint Tom when he’s in the water’, and that could have been that. But that choice, however subconsciously made, is a significant one. It could, for example, have been the case that the painter actu- ally wanted to express something about what it is like to be in prison, or better, what it feels like to be in prison. One ‘falls’ into prison on what often seems to be a linear, downwards trajectory. Once there – after the plunge into the new environment – it will take a while to get accustomed to your new life as a prisoner. You will need time to find your feet. At some point, you will start thinking about life after prison, and you may even come to realize that, ultimately, there is hope and there is the possibility of redemp- tion. There is light at the end of the tunnel (or in this case: at the surface) but you yourself will have to work your way towards it. You cannot leave it to others to do this for you. Perhaps this painter is, possibly without really consciously realizing it, artisti- cally expressing how he felt, or where he saw himself, in his own process of rehabilitation and reform. Might it not be the case that the painter saw himself at exactly the point where, like the diver, away from the gaze of those in the outside world and quite sheltered in a way, he is wresting himself free from the determinations of his past, gradually preparing to take his life in his own hands, and embarking upon a road which criminologists tend to call the process of desistance from crime? It may have been the case that his artistic endeavours and accomplishments have indeed, as the Koestler Trust hopes, contributed to this painter’s rehabilitative ‘moment’.
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But a picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words. We (the painter himself, and
us, the criminologists looking at his work) can say all kinds of things about the painting, but none of our words or statements will be able to capture the whole image. Highly metaphorical language, or poetry, or language with very high ‘imagery’ content, can go some way (see e. g. Bachelard, 1964), but not too far. You could do the following experiment. Just look at the painting for a while, and try to forget all the words and ideas that are now bubbling up in your mind. Try to sense what it feels like to fall into a swimming pool from a height of about 15 meters, and to arrive at the point where you are just about finding something like a balance. Well, that, the painter seems to be suggesting, is what it feels like to arrive at a turning point in your life, in prison. The point that is made here is that images have something really physical, something really bodily about them. Yes, we can use language to talk about them. Yes, we can use con- cepts (e. g. ‘rehabilitation’, ‘reform’, ‘determination’, ‘desistance’, and so on) to think about them. But, in the end, images will always elude the grasp of anything in the way of conceptual language that we can throw at them. They are, first and foremost, sensory phenomena. As philosophers (e. g. Gendlin, 1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1968) and neurobi- ologists (e. g. Damasio, 2003) alike have argued, images are, first and foremost, about the senses, about feeling and about emotion. Realizing this, and acquiring an attitude that takes account of this, could be the first methodological step that researchers of the image may wish to take (see also Young, 2014, for a related argument).
We will explore these issues in some depth below. In the next section, you will find
explanations as to why ‘the visual’ has emerged as one of the more salient themes in criminology.
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