Photography and evidence: reflections on the imagistic violence

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of imagistic violence by focusing—by means of a phenomenology open to dialogue with neighboring disciplines, from historiography to semiotics—on the particular case of photographs depicting atrocities, examples of photojournalism or images captured at crime scenes by forensic agents and presented as evidence during trials. To this end, I will implement a three-step analysis. First, I will seek to clarify the meanings associated with photography presented as evidence by adopting Husserl’s phenomenological framework and by following a historiographical and juridical approach while verifying the grounds for the opposition that appears to be emerging between a paradigm of resemblance and a model of indirect, conjectural knowledge. Second, I will focus on how photography’s capacity to sustain a maximum degree of the reproduction of the real is problematized when the pictorial object is a violent scene that suspends, contradicts, and dismantles the order of the viewer’s experience. Finally, I will conclude by offering a hypothesis on the act of “seeing-with-other” and its phenomenological implications for the case of imagistic violence as evidence. Specifically, I will argue that we are more likely to understand imagistic violence at the level of a collective seeing than through a solitary gaze.