Modern forensics: photography and other suspects

Walter Benjamin's reading of Eugene Atget's photographs suggests an intertwining of two modes of subject formation: legal and aesthetic. Here, photography has both an aesthetic and forensic potential: the photographer's aesthetic activity which is already involved in a transformation of art practice and perception intersects with the kinds of forensic knowledge of the world that have been fundamental to legal formations of the subject. Andre Bazin's conjunction of the photograph and the finger print both underlines his indexical concept of photographic ontology and the forensic intertwining of these two indexical signs in the modern rituals of policing, identification, and proof: mug shots and fingerprinting. If, as Benjamin also suggested, photography and cinema reveal an "optical unconscious," this may be seen as an unforeseeable and possibly unstable extension of an empirical imperative that is fiundamental to modernity, and which is one of the legal foundations of modern subjectivity. Beginning with a discussion of 19th century photography, law, and the parallel development of finger printing, and then going on to consider Blow-Up (1966, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni), this paper examines the