Images as useful research tools

Images as useful research tools

‘Making sense’ of an image is, as I have tried to explain at the start of this chapter, a matter of ‘sensing’, really bodily ‘sensing’, what is going on in it. This bodily, sensory dimension of images is also the point where images (e. g. photographs or paintings) can become ‘useful’ for the researcher. Visual researchers sometimes use images to gain access to their research subjects (e. g. prisoners, homeless people, residents of a particular neighbourhood, graffiti artists, gang members, police officers, and so on). Images don’t just help to establish contact with research subjects at a deeper emo- tional level than questionnaires or interview schedules, but, because they often achieve this, they also make it easier for research subjects, when invited to express what they think and feel about the images under consideration, to talk about their own life experiences and about the meanings they attach to those.

The visual researcher may decide to go beyond mere photo elicitation (and subsequent photo elucidation) and encourage her research subjects to actually produce their own images or visual materials (videos, paintings, photographs, etc. – all worth a lot more than a thousand words), in order to, more directly and quite often, more sensitively express what it feels like to live such a life in such and such conditions. And finally, the researcher may then decide, for similar rea- sons, to disseminate the results of her research efforts using visual formats or images (e. g. posters, artwork, or perhaps an exhibition of photographs), instead of, or perhaps complementary to, language-based formats such as scientific arti- cles or books.

IMAGES OF JUSTICE, LAW AND ORDER

Let us now add one more insight. The question here is: What is it that images of justice, law and order can ‘tell’ us about? Do they just tell us about what we know as ‘law’ or ‘justice’ or ‘order’? Suppose that during your research into the history of the death penalty you stumble across Gerard David’s diptych The Judgment of Cambyses (Figures 19. 2 and 19. 3). The painting was completed in 1498 and was hung in the chambers of the then aldermen’s court in the Flemish city of Bruges (it still hangs in Bruges, in a local museum). Do have a look at the first panel (Figure 19. 2). Here, a magistrate, or judge, Sisamnes, is arrested by the emperor Cambyses and his officials. In the backdrop you can see the judge’s crime: he accepts a bribe. Now move to panel 2 (Figure 19. 3). Here the judge is executed for his crime. He is being flayed alive. In the background, there is a scene that takes place shortly after the execution: the judge’s son, Otanes, has been appointed the new magistrate by the emperor and is seated on a bench draped with his father’s skin. The painter’s ‘brief and charge’ was probably to paint such a scene in order to remind Bruges’ magistrates of the need to remain morally virtuous.

Now: is this diptych showing us something about law and justice at the end of the fifteenth century in Flanders? We know from the historical record that public execu- tions could be very gruesome indeed in those days. But the theme of this painting is not particularly interesting to us. The painter only depicted a scene from Antiquity that was well known in the fifteenth century. The judgment of Cambyses was then known from ancient Greek historical sources that situated the story during the even earlier reign of a Persian emperor called Cambyses. This is good to know but that is not what makes the paintings in this diptych ‘telling’. There is also a lot of symbolism in the paintings – for example, the white hound symbolizes moral virtue, and both genital-licking mongrels stand for corruption and depravity. But, again, this is not what makes the picture interesting.

FIgure 19. 2 Gerard David, The Judgment of Cambyses (1498), Panel 1, The Arrest of Sisamnes, Bruges, Groeninghe Museum

FIgure 19. 3 Gerard David, The Judgment of Cambyses (1498), Panel 2, The Flaying of Sisamnes, Bruges, Groeninghe Museum

If, however, you look at the form and composition of the panels, then you are bound to notice something. On the first panel, the whole situation has something fixed or ‘frozen’ about it. The scene on the second panel takes place in the open air, and there is a lot more dynamism to be noted in the market square. The new magistrate, Otanes, governs from what looks like an open and transparent court- house. We are able to see what is going on there. There are no backroom dealings going on in there. All is in the open and citizens seem to be entering and leaving the courthouse freely. This, at the time, was a new way of painting and it could very well be said that the painter, David, must have ‘sensed’ and picked up the emergence, at the end of the fifteenth century, of new ways of governance, and indeed a whole new way of life and of living together, which philosophers and jurists such as Thomas Moore, Niccolo Machiavelli and Erasmus of Rotterdam were only beginning to theorize about 15 years after the painting was completed (more on this particular painting is to be read in Lippens, 2009). So, here we have a painting that on the surface is about a ‘law and justice’ theme, but that is actually ‘telling’ us a lot more about a lot more. It depicts ‘social and political change’ at the end of the fifteenth century.

The reverse also holds. All images can potentially be useful to the visual crimi-

nologist, not just the ones that explicitly depict law and justice related scenes. Think, in art, for example, of Jackson Pollock’s signature ‘drip technique’ paintings which he started roughly from the end of the 1940s onwards. Do Google this painter’s name and you will be able to see what is meant here by Pollock’s drip technique. This technique, and this ‘form’ in painting, was, at the time, extremely new. Are these paintings of interest to visual criminologists? They are if you know that Pollock, on one of the very few occasions that he spoke about his art, men- tioned that they are about ‘control’. Then you realize that, having gone, like so many others, through the horrible experience of the Second World War, and the authoritarianisms that drove it, Pollock took it as his ‘brief and charge’ to express a way of life in which no authority, no power, no force would be able to capture and restrict individuals’ control over their life conditions or make a dent in their personal sovereignty. Jackson’s dripping paint traces, then, represent people’s unrelenting attempts to elude the grasp of law and authority. Here again we have an artist who ‘sensed’ a changing mood which only manifested itself fully in the decades after 1950, and which sociologists and criminologists are still trying to analyse and theorize even now. Pollock had ‘sensed’ this mood, had ‘grasped’ it and had very physically – Pollock’s painting technique was physically intense – expressed it, all those years ago (on this, see Lippens, 2011).

The point that is made here is that any image can, at least potentially, be of inter-

est to visual researchers in criminology. Images work on a deeper, sensory level. On this level, linguistic and conceptual boundaries between ‘crime’ and ‘conformity’, or ‘law’ and ‘transgression’, or ‘order’ and ‘disorder’, or ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ make little ‘sense’. Images live largely on the pre-conceptual level of sense and experience.