Somebody’s – Or Nothing: Visual Evidence, Blackness and the Limits of Legal Seeing

Why does visual evidence, when in defence of Black people, always fail to meet the proper evidentiary standards? This article suggests that one part of an answer to this question might be found in early legal debates about how to deal with ‘evidence’ that photography allegedly proffers to the trier of fact. These debates revealed how the introduction of visual culture in the courtroom challenged a legal culture that hinged on the spoken and written word. Likewise, it also marked the beginning of an unstable legal discourse on visual evidence that continues to shape our present-day understanding of evidence and how we have come to see and interpret visual evidence. The argument advanced here, then, is that this legal seeing—refracted by and through whiteness and foundationally anti-Black—is the ideological filter through which the public have been conditioned to make sense of visual evidence of anti-Black violence and death. Finally, the article turns to the work of Carrie Mae Weems to claim that Black people, through a multitude of practices, continue to construct alternative forms of visual evidence that challenge law’s stronghold on what counts as evidentiary.