The symposium Photography and Evidence will ask what the notion of evidence does to the practice and form of photography, particularly at a time when skepticism and digital technologies have eroded faith in the medium’s veracity.
The event is free and open to the public. But please RSVP at developingroom@gmail.com
Sponsors
Center for Cultural Analysis
Art History Department, Rutgers University
Humanities Dean’s Office, Rutgers
Angela Strassheim: Evidence No. 10. 2009
Respondent
Gary Schneider, Mason Gross School of Arts, Rutgers University
Gary Schneider
Mason Gross School of Arts, Rutgers University
Gary Schneider is Assistant Professor of Photography at the Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. He was born in East London, South Africa, and lives and works in New York. He has a BFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, South Africa and an MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Schneider’s solo exhibitions include: Artists Space, New York City; The Musee de L’Elysee Lausanne, Switzerland; The International Center of Photography, New York City; The Sackler Museum, Boston; and The Museum of Photographic Art in San Diego. He has received numerous awards and grants, including most recently a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship last year, as well as an Eisenstaedt Award from Life Magazine and the Columbia School of Journalism; a National Endowment for the Arts grant; and the Lou Stoumen Award. Public collections that include his work are: The National Gallery of Canada; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Whitney Museum; Yale University Art Museum; The Guggenheim Museum; Harvard Art Museums; and The Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Prof. Schneider has expanded the notion of evidence in his own photographic art practice and will serve as respondent to the symposium papers.
Talks
Reasonable Doubt? On the ‘Resolution’ of Contradictory Photographs - Jordan Bear
Reasonable Doubt? On the ‘Resolution’ of Contradictory Photographs
Jordan Bear, University of Toronto
ABSTRACT
Some of the most compelling recent scholarship on the history of photography has sought to demonstrate how the special evidentiary authority of the medium has evolved. The most gripping episodes in this evolution are ones of incompatibility between what photography was believed to be and what its users needed it to do. Even if one believed that photographs could not lie, one crucial legal case to be discussed in this chapter made clear that they could tell different and irreconcilable stories about a single event. And if both sides had produced discordant ‘evidence’ from the same photographic source, how could that source—or, indeed, the photographic medium at large—possibly contain any authoritative evidentiary value? In 1917 labor activist Tom Mooney and his wife were indicted on trumped-up charges of dynamiting a militaristic parade in San Francisco and causing several deaths. In their defense, the couple offered an apparently air-tight alibi: a photograph of the Mooneys miles away from the site of the detonation at just four minutes before the blast. The exculpatory feature of the photograph, however, was beyond the naked eye: a tiny speck in the distance which, when enlarged several thousand times, revealed the face of a street clock displaying a time that seemed to exonerate the defendant. In short order, the prosecution offered its own enlargement, based upon the negative, which had been in its custody all along. This second image demonstrated that enlarging the clock face to the degree proposed by the defense obliterated any legible detail. The photograph, the district attorney averred, exonerated nobody, because it revealed nothing visible. The constant juxtaposition of the two photographs in the picture press seemed to emphasize their susceptibility to polysemous interpretation: there was no final ground level whose truths would be yielded with proper magnification. Indeed, the prosecution’s version of the photograph seemed to suggest that there might, paradoxically, be a level at which the image would begin to disintegrate, where the tools of analysis might outstrip the formal capacity of the photograph to ‘resolve’. This chapter explores the repertoire of enlargements proffered in this case—both in court and in the press—to show how doubts about the photographic medium as evidence were closely linked to specific changes in the relationship among magnification, enlargement, and knowledge in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
BIO
Jordan Bear is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Disillusioned: Victorian Photography and the Discerning Subject (Penn State University Press, forthcoming 2015). Previously, he served as Lecturer in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where he completed his doctorate on an ACLS/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. He has also served as the Chester Dale Fellow in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His writing, published in History of Photography, Cabinet, Visual Resources, Photography and Culture and Grey Room, among other venues, has focused on the historical intersection of photography, knowledge and belief. He is currently at work on a second book-length project on history painting, evidence, and techniques of display in the early Nineteenth Century.
Feeling History: Evidence, Vernacular Documentation, and the Kennedy Assassination - Catherine Zuromskis
Feeling History: Evidence, Vernacular Documentation, and the Kennedy Assassination
Catherine Zuromskis, University of New Mexico
ABSTRACT
Since its origin, photography has been characterized as fundamentally evidentiary. The camera’s mechanical nature constitutes a claim to unbiased accuracy and the indexicality of the photographic process offers existential assurance that what we see in the image, as Roland Barthes puts it, “has been.” Yet Sarah Kember argues in Virtual Anxiety that our understanding of photography is not so much technologically as phenomenologically and epistemologically determined. This suggests that our faith in photography’s evidentiary capabilities may be as much a product of historical attitudes, ideologies, and feelings as it is of the technology or ontology of the medium itself. To explore this idea, this paper will examine what I argue is a significant shift in the way we perceive the camera’s evidentiary capabilities from an omniscient and authoritative technological mode of documentation, to the more subjective, felt encounter provided by citizen journalism and the lens of vernacular technology. To demonstrate this shift, I focus on one of the most significant American events to be captured on film: the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Given the media savvy of the Kennedy administration, it is somewhat remarkable that Kennedy’s death was only captured on film by the snapshot and home movie cameras of amateur bystanders. As evidence, these vernacular traces are unusual: they allow us to witness the historical moment, seemingly “first hand” through the eyes of an everyday citizen. But they also fail to prove anything we don’t already know or solve the crime we see committed. Despite this, TV footage, print journalism, popular film, and the didactic exhibitions of the 6th Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza have posited these images as more revealing than the wealth of professional documentation of Kennedy’s presidency. As such, I argue, these photographic and filmic documents constitute not so much a failure of technological representation as a key historical shift in the ideological narrative of visual documentation. In the emergent age of American neoliberalism, the photographic document is understood less as a means to furnish proof and more as means to see and, indeed, to feel history through first-person experience.
BIO
Catherine Zuromskis is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico with a focus on photography, contemporary art, and twentieth-century American visual culture. She is author of Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (MIT Press, 2013), and the author and editor of The Factory (La Fabrica, 2012), the catalog for the exhibition From the Factory to the World: Photography and the Warhol Community, which she curated for PhotoEspaña 2012. Her writings on photography, film, and visual culture have appeared Art Journal, American Quarterly, The Velvet Light Trap, Photography & Culture, Criticism, and the anthology Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Routledge: 2009). She is working on a new project dealing with technology, evidence, and the rise of neoliberalism in the US.
Evidence - Angela Strassheim
Evidence
Angela Strassheim, Photographer
ABSTRACT
My work is a blend of art and forensic photography. A year after completing my undergraduate degree, I did my training in Miami with the Forensic Imaging Bureau in Dade County. This involved surveillance from the air and ground, photographing entry and exit evidence from home invasions, and accompany a medical examiner to crime scenes and then to the autopsy room, where I would photograph the postmortems and sometimes even the defense wounds on the accused. These experiences led to my first job as the only photographer at the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Division of Forensic Science Crime Lab in Richmond. There I photographed gunshot residue, fingerprints and DNA related images from convicted people that were used in the courtroom as demonstrative evidence. I returned to photography as art in 2001 at Yale University. Just when I thought forensics was behind me, 9/11 happened on our first day of class, and so I quickly ended up working part-time with the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner for several years. This ongoing engagement with forensics, even as I completed my MFA, set unconscious perimeters in how I make pictures today. The potential of all my forensic photographs is that they might be used in court, and so they need to be well exposed with the bodies looking as clean as possible. This taught me to compose an image instead of taking a picture: paying close attention to what you include and exclude, considering everything in the image equally, including the subject and the space around it.
BIO
Angela Strassheim lives in Connecticut and works in New York and Israel. She received her MFA in Photography from Yale University and, before that, a Forensic & Biomedical Photography Certification from the Metro-Dade County Forensic Imaging Bureau, Miami, FL. She is a prolific producer of images that have been shown internationally at high-profile venues, both in group and solo exhibitions. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Women in Photography-LTI Lightside Grant for her project Evidence, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship and McKnight Foundation Photography Fellowship. She is represented by the Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York.