{"title":"Untangling Fact, Fiction, Fantasy—and Outright Lies: Compilation Films as Archival Piracy","authors":"Dale Hudson","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0065","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Films compiled from archival footage unsettle assumptions about film and photography’s ability to capture truth—and the archive’s ability to contain it—through a critical practice of pirating. Sandhya Suri’s Around India with a Movie Camera, Rona Sela’s Looted and Hidden: Palestinian Archives in Israel, and Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection manipulate images from archives to expose the technical and institutional manipulations within colonial propaganda, posing questions about how and when visual evidence becomes truth, with implications for mobile phone eyewitness videos today—and also deepfakes in viral disinformation.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75103863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Body of Evidence","authors":"David Levi Strauss","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0068","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Focusing on Darnella Frazier’s cellphone video of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, George Holliday’s video of the 1991 beating of Rodney King, and Abraham Zapruder’s film of the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, the nature and shifting consequences of such “citizen witness” visual evidence are examined, in an attempt to better understand the changing relation between evidence and truth. What role does subjectivity play in the making and receiving of “citizen witness” visual evidence? Can imagination play a larger role in our determinations of the value of evidence?","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89951212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Photograph as Evidence of Itself: Representation, Reflexivity, and Tautology in Light-Based Art","authors":"David LaRocca","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0060","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What habit of perception—of description—gives human viewers of photographs the confidence to regard them as evidence? In this comparative study of work by John Opera (b. 1975) and Jill Freedman (1939–2019), light-based art is subject to an analytic pressure that may undermine epistemic claims about what it is photographs can be said to contain. What constitutes a photograph in nonhuman terms is different from what we say, or want to say, it represents. Physics, philosophy, and the history of photography intersect at the point where we leap from image to meaning.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88839311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Endangered Scholars Worldwide","authors":"D. Bulut","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0056","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0056","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74070160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Orchid in the Land of Technology: On the World Made by Photography","authors":"Gregg M. Horowitz","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0059","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Interest in “photographic evidence” typically centers on questions of what photographs disclose about the world. This forensic interest responds to the fact that photographic images are made through opto-mechanical processes that are independent of human intention. However, because photography is a means of automatic world picturing, it also has the power to populate the world with a-human images. The ways such images remake the world are investigated through critical readings of Michael Fried, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Max Kozloff.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87253960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Videos, Police Violence, and Scrutiny of the Black Body","authors":"Sherri Irvin","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0063","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The ability of videos to serve as evidence of racial injustice is complex and contested. This essay argues that scrutiny of the Black body has come to play a key role in how videos of police violence are mined for evidence, following a long history of racialized surveillance and attributions of threat and superhuman powers to Black bodies. Using videos to combat injustice requires incorporating humanizing narratives and cultivating resistant modes of looking.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90327053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Guest Editor’s Introduction","authors":"Paul a. Kottman","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0058","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73603909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Atlas of Invisible Images","authors":"William C. Fenstermaker","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0066","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As computer vision and artificial intelligence exert increasing influence on day-to-day affairs, and as surveillance and data profiling invade more spheres of contemporary life, a loose group of artists reveals the invisible images at the center of these systems. Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Teju Cole, Mishka Henner, Michael Wolf, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Forensic Architecture, and others work to expose the hidden mechanisms that operate outside of public view—and are therefore not subject to the commons—yet nonetheless define politics, society, and culture.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74982089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Future Anterior Witness: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death","authors":"Julie Beth Napolin","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0064","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay describes acts of recording by Rakeiya Scott and Diamond Reynolds, who captured on cellphone video and vocally narrated the police deaths of their loved ones. There is a long Western tradition of testifying to the death of a loved one while it is unfolding. In the United States, this history is racialized by unjust Black death and the forms of extra-juridical testimony, from Frederick Douglass to Ida B. Wells, that accompany it. But cellphone technology breaks with these traditions by making it possible to broadcast in the present and to a future audience; the women narrate in the future anterior tense. These videos do not provide visual evidence and also break with Susan Sontag’s and Saidiya Hartman’s sanction of violent images. The ethical and juridical demand of these videos is to listen and thus recognize the singularity of the loved one, who is also a citizen.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90909056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Medium Seen Otherwise","authors":"Roger Hallas","doi":"10.1353/sor.2022.0062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2022.0062","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the innovative incorporation of photography into documentary film, exploring the various ways this specific manifestation of intermediality permits us to see both photography and documentary film otherwise. Photographs, whether professional or vernacular, are conventionally understood to furnish documentaries with indexical evidence and visual illustration of history, yet the spatiotemporal and aural dimensions of film permit documentaries to illuminate photography’s wider capacities beyond the merely representational. This essay argues that film can document more effectively than other media what people do with analog and digital photographs as material objects that enable various forms of social and political relationality through multisensory experience. Moreover, film can bring the event of photography into fuller view, demonstrating how no single participant (photographer, subject, camera, photograph, or viewer) has sovereignty over its affect, meaning, or value.","PeriodicalId":21868,"journal":{"name":"Social Research: An International Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78487579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}