Spectacular Law and Order: Photography, Social Harm, and the Production of Ignorance. Dymock, A. In Barton, A. & Davis, H., editors, Ignorance, Power and Harm: Agnotology and The Criminological Imagination, of Critical Criminological Perspectives, pages 189–211. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2018.
Spectacular Law and Order: Photography, Social Harm, and the Production of Ignorance [link]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
This chapter brings into conversation the study of ignorance and visual criminology. Visual criminologists have tended to argue that visual evidence of harms, particularly those perpetuated by the state, might expand the criminological imagination and has the potential to produce counter-discourses to official understandings of crime. Surveying the classic theory of photography and spectatorship, I contest this claim on two counts. Firstly, I argue that photography may be more ambivalent than this. Rather than awakening consciousness, photographs of harm and suffering often merely reproduce official and state perspectives, or else are so unbearable to witness as to provoke a desire to unsee. Secondly, I suggest it is not the photograph itself that has the power to emancipate, but spectators themselves, as active producers of meaning.
@incollection{dymock_spectacular_2018,
	address = {Cham},
	series = {Critical {Criminological} {Perspectives}},
	title = {Spectacular {Law} and {Order}: {Photography}, {Social} {Harm}, and the {Production} of {Ignorance}},
	isbn = {978-3-319-97343-2},
	shorttitle = {Spectacular {Law} and {Order}},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97343-2_9},
	abstract = {This chapter brings into conversation the study of ignorance and visual criminology. Visual criminologists have tended to argue that visual evidence of harms, particularly those perpetuated by the state, might expand the criminological imagination and has the potential to produce counter-discourses to official understandings of crime. Surveying the classic theory of photography and spectatorship, I contest this claim on two counts. Firstly, I argue that photography may be more ambivalent than this. Rather than awakening consciousness, photographs of harm and suffering often merely reproduce official and state perspectives, or else are so unbearable to witness as to provoke a desire to unsee. Secondly, I suggest it is not the photograph itself that has the power to emancipate, but spectators themselves, as active producers of meaning.},
	language = {en},
	urldate = {2018-11-22},
	booktitle = {Ignorance, {Power} and {Harm}: {Agnotology} and {The} {Criminological} {Imagination}},
	publisher = {Springer International Publishing},
	author = {Dymock, Alex},
	editor = {Barton, Alana and Davis, Howard},
	year = {2018},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-97343-2_9},
	keywords = {Agnotology, PRINTED (Fonds papier), Photography, Praxis, Social harm, Spectacle, Visual criminology},
	pages = {189--211},
}

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