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5. Images that attempt to explain or comment on crime or deviance
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5. Images that attempt to explain or comment on crime or deviance
Edward Hopper knew many of the painters who were members of an early twen- tieth-century artistic group, i. e. the so-called Ashcan group, a group of realist painters. One of those painters was Everett Shinn. He would paint street fights and so on. But he also painted ‘Eviction’ in 1904 (you may wish to Google this paint- ing). This painting does a lot of explaining. It explains what life was like in the slums of New York around the turn of the twentieth century, and suggests why this was the case.
6. The use of images in crime control and criminal justice
Images have their uses in all stages of the criminal justice process. This is of course well known. One of the emerging phenomena in criminal justice is the introduction, during trial proceedings, of FMRI imaging (brain scans, to you and me). In some trial proceedings, evidence will include visual materials such as photographs, or CCTV footage, and so on. The use of images during court proceedings tends to have a very significant impact on those present (Feigenson, 2016).
7. Images of crime control and criminal justice
Throughout history, artists have produced images of court proceedings, punishment, execution, as well as images of torture and cruel and unusual forms of punishment
and treatment (see recent theoretical work on such topics by visual criminologists such as Carrabine (2011a, 2011b) or Morrison (2004)). One topic that has been ignored somewhat is art by prisoners and detainees themselves. Prisoners themselves have of course lots to say about crime and justice. Some of them ‘say’ it through visual art. Let us remind ourselves that we started this chapter by analysing one such work of art. Let us now move on to some methodological considerations.
EXPERIENCING AND USING IMAGES
It should come as no surprise that roughly since the turn of the century a consider- able number of textbooks on visual methodology have seen the light (e. g. Rose, 2016). In what follows, we will be able to highlight only a number of crucially impor- tant issues in visual research and methods.
In all the areas or themes listed in the previous sections, images may appear on the researcher’s radar in at least two ways. We shall consider both of these separately, although it should be stressed that some research designs may of course include ele- ments of both. First, there are images which the researcher will have stumbled across during her research, such as a photograph taken in a neighbourhood that has a repu- tation for being ‘rough’, or a video clip that purports to depict or document police brutality, or the dress, tattoos and jewellery that, gang members tell us, symbolize what they stand for, or perhaps a painting made by a ‘lifer’ in prison, or a series of photographs taken by political revolutionaries (see e. g. Lippens, 2003a), or by busi- ness marketing executives (see e. g. Lippens, 2003b). These images were already there. The researcher was not involved in their fabrication, and now she has to ‘make sense’ of them, for example in a bid to understand how the images shed light on what life is like within the cultural context (within the ‘sub-culture’, we would once have said) where it was produced or whence it emerged. Here, the work of the researcher is largely about ‘making sense’ of the images within their particular social and his- torical context.
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But there is at least one other way through which images may enter a particular
research project. Here the researcher uses the image as a tool to get things done, to achieve particular goals. The researcher may wish, for example, to use the image to connect with her research subjects on a more emotional level, thus going beyond the standard interview and observation formats. This certainly ‘makes sense’ in light of what we have said above. Or the researcher may decide to invite her research sub- jects, during the very research process itself, to produce their own visual materials and imagery to express, at a sensory level, what their life is like, and what their life experiences ‘feel’ like. For example, researchers could ask offenders to take photo- graphs or make pictures or artworks that express something of their experience, for instance their experience of imprisonment, or their experience as a supervisee on probation (see e. g. Fitzgibbon et al., 2017). Other researchers have asked asylum
seekers and refugees to go on walks in the urban environment and to produce art- work based on their experience as refugees, and their experience of the walk as a refugee (see e. g. O’Neill, 2017).
Making sense of images
Let us first consider the situation whereby the researcher comes across an image. The type of image is important here. Are we talking about a photograph? Is it a painting? Or is it a still from a film? Each of these types has to be considered appropriately. Photographs, for example, as the cultural critic Susan Sontag has argued and demon- strated some time ago (1977), are surprisingly deceptive. They have something ‘real’ about them (who could deny that the figures on this or that photograph were actually there doing the things they obviously were doing there and then? ) but, once taken, the photograph very often ends up in the hands of people who don’t have a clue whatsoever about the circumstances in which the photograph was taken, and the purposes or, indeed, the hidden agendas with which this was done. Was the scene in the photograph staged? Was it meant to discredit something? Accuse someone? Is it, for all its apparent ‘realness’, a blunt lie? The researcher should be very wary of this, particularly where photographic material is concerned. The French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes (1977) – semiotics is the discipline and study of signs – adds that photographs have their own ‘rhetoric’, that is, they evoke a whole series of connotations which the researcher may have the background, or not, as the case may be, to detect. But there will always be a remainder of meaning in the visual dimension of the photographic image that, although very important, the researcher will be unable to put his finger on, explain or interpret. This remainder, or excess of mean- ing, Barthes says, is the image’s ‘obtuse meaning’, i. e. that which cannot really be captured by textual and conceptual explanation, but which, nevertheless, has a serious impact – sensory impact – on the beholder. The same applies to stills from films. The complication with stills is that they are actually snapshots taken out of a particular context. By this is meant that stills are ‘frozen’ images extracted from what, basically, is a story and a more or less structured narrative that has its own often deliberate purpose and contemplated structure. Without any information on the latter, the researcher will often find himself in the dark of the still’s ‘obtuse meaning’.
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The image on the researcher’s desk, however, could be a painting, or a drawing, or a work of art. Artworks are a different kind of image. Here, a whole number of questions about the context of its production arise. With historical paintings in par- ticular, the researcher has to be aware of the fact that paintings were often commissioned by public, governmental or individual patrons of the art. That which the researcher believes they are able to ‘sense’ on the canvas, could, to some extent at least, be the result of what those who commissioned the artwork had in mind. Such artworks would not necessarily be able to ‘tell’ us (or better: ‘show’ us) a lot about the particular social or cultural conditions in which they were produced.
On the other hand, works of art, such as paintings for example, that were not commissioned, but that, on the contrary, were the fruit of the artist’s creative and expressive imagination, are much more interesting as indicators of the ‘feel’ of the context of the particular age, or culture, in which they emerged. That said though, the painter, or the visual artist, even those that produce commissioned work, is bound to express something of herself, and her conditions of life, or her life experi- ences, in her works of art. The work of art, after all, is and remains a work of art, and, as art theorists such as Hillis Miller (1992) have argued, the ‘artistic’ aspect of the work, on the one hand, holds and betrays something of the world that produced it (and that is certainly of interest to us as researchers), whilst, at the same time, it also announces, at least potentially so, what is yet to come. In the next section, we shall discuss illustrations of this. For now, let us stress that, when confronted with artistic images, the researcher could do worse than ponder the extent to which the artwork (an etching of war crime atrocities, for example, or an artistic impression of life on the streets of a drugs-ridden neighbourhood in London) is an expression not just of what is, but also, though perhaps less obviously so, a harbinger of what is to come, or what is in the process of emerging. Artists, as some art historians (e. g. Haskell, 1993) have intimated, tend to be slightly more sensitive about emerging trends than most of us. Even before new social and cultural developments will have found their way into linguistic expressions or conceptual abstraction (i. e. in thought, speech and writing by journalists, academics, and so on), they will often have appeared in works of art by artists who were sensitive enough to pick up (‘sense’) early manifestations of those emerging trends, and who may have worked them into their paintings, drawings, etchings or installations. To put this somewhat cheekily: if, as a criminologist, you want to be ahead of the game of social and cultural interpre- tation, maybe you want to become an art historian or an art theorist first?
Let us now return to the researcher’s desk and to the image on it. Let us suppose
that the researcher has established that the image is a painting by a local community worker who tried to express what life ‘feels’ like in his local community. In this case, for example, the local community is a seriously deprived neighbourhood in a com- pletely de-industrialized area, marked by high levels of unemployment, drug abuse and organized street crime (do Google, once more, the ‘Ashcan’ group; see also above). The researcher must now ask himself a number of questions:
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· Did the community worker paint this himself?
· Was this work commissioned? If so, who commissioned it? Was it the local coun- cil, or a particular political party, or a charity, or an offender rehabilitation volun- teering organization, or was it someone else altogether?
In any case, the researcher will then have to find out about, and think through, the artist’s ‘brief and charge’, as the art theorist Michael Baxandall (1985) called it. In other words, what did the artist think he had to do when he was working on the paint- ing? In commissioned work, this may be slightly easier as there may be information
available (less so in older works) about the aims, restrictions and instructions that were given to the artist. In non-commissioned work, the artist herself usually invents or imagines her own ‘brief and charge’, taking clues from her everyday life experience, her surroundings, local and global conditions and trends, media reports, personal ambitions, aspirations, disappointments, and resulting emotions such as affection, anger, thirst for vengeance, or (why not) forgiveness, and so on, and on. Even in commissioned work, such elements will almost inevitably ‘slip in’. It is, of course, impossible to completely lay bare the ‘patterns of intention’ (dixit Baxandall) that underpin the whole ‘brief and charge’ of a particular artistic image. Nearly always there will be, simply put, too many gaps in our understanding. Sometimes the artist, or the maker of the image, is able to say something that sheds some light on their patterns of intention, but this is not always the case, and whatever the artist or image maker says about it should never be taken at face value. The community worker in our example may claim that he painted the work because he felt he needed to give members of the local community hope, and a ‘voice’ in local policy decisions. He may mean what he says, and it may therefore at some level be ‘true’. But in his brief and charge there may also be hidden motivations and unspoken, subconscious ambi- tions (e. g. his desire to achieve ‘heroic’ status locally by attacking the local council’s policies) which the community worker would rather not talk about, or which he may actually not be fully conscious of. It should come as no surprise that it is often impos- sible to attain this level of detailed insight and understanding, although it should also be said that in art history this is often attempted. Mary Gedo (1994), for example, has been able to show how subconscious traces of events in the biography of the famous Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte had an impact on his work, and are actually indispensable for a good understanding of his paintings.
Once the brief and charge, or the patterns of intention surrounding the work, have
been researched and analysed – always partially, always incompletely – the researcher will then have to ‘make sense’ of the image. Clues may of course, as said, be found in what the artist himself says or writes about the work. Such material should certainly not be ignored. But we already know that the artist, or the image maker, may not really be, or have been, aware himself of much of his own patterns of intention, or the social and cultural conditions in which those took shape. The artist may actually sometimes make attempts, whether subconsciously or not, to ‘hide’ or ‘mask’ some of these materials from the researcher, and from the world. This is the point – the point of ‘making sense’ – where the researcher properly enters the scene. Depending on the level of her cultural background and baggage, her insight into social and cultural his- tory and trends, and research skills, she may be able – or not, as the case may be – to shed additional light on the ‘sense’ of the image, and to complement what the artist or the maker (or others for that matter) have already said about it. But here the researcher needs to be critically self-reflective. Her own ‘sense making’ will itself be structured by her own patterns of intention, and by her own adopted and sometimes cherished brief and charge. To evoke British cultural critic John Berger’s words here, there will always be different ‘ways of seeing’ (1972).
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How to ‘make sense’ of an image? Images often include symbolic elements. Symbols are images that refer to particular conventional meanings. You know that the notion of ‘justice’ is often allegorically represented by an image of a woman hold- ing scales and wearing a blindfold. Justice’s blindfold, for example, conventionally signifies, for instance, impartiality. In a way, such symbolic elements are not very interesting. Although symbolic conventionality can and often does change through history and across cultural contexts (see on this, for example, Stolleis (2009) on the changing symbolic meaning of the ‘all-seeing eye’ of authority in official documents and iconography), ultimately there is always something conventional and static – and possibly dull – about symbols. However, images also have form, colour and composi- tion and it is those that the criminological researcher may wish to focus her attention on. It is in those more formal characteristics, for example, that researchers might be able to detect social and cultural historical change. If a painter suddenly uses a new technique, form or composition to express an idea, then this should prompt visual researchers to sit up and take note. They could be on the trace of a newly emerging social or cultural trend that has not yet manifested itself conceptually in language.
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