Vernacular Image Forensics: Everyday Spectatorship of State Violence

This course explores the rise of a vernacular mode of forensic spectatorship through the relationship between two contradictory facets of contemporary visual culture. On the one hand, our screens are flooded with audio-visual documents of state violence, like livestreams of police killings and GoPro footage of Israeli soldiers in Gaza. We rely upon these images to hold perpetrators accountable and to make sense of the increasing complexity and abstraction of global capitalism. On the other hand, our so-called “post-truth” era and its attendant AI and deep fake anxieties has eroded the belief that these images can meaningfully reference a shared reality. While we urgently rely upon photographic images to make sense of the world, we also look at them with suspicion. From this tension arises an everyday fixation with image forensics, registered by cultural texts as wide ranging as true crime shows, conspiracy theory videos, investigative reporting, and popular documentaries. Surrounded with visual evidence, audiences have become forensic analysts. In this class we will explore this tension and mode of spectatorship, grounding both in debates across film and media theory surrounding the evidentiary value of photographic-based images. Through reading primary sources from the history of photography and film, and texts in film theory, documentary studies, critical theory, and forensic science, we will historicize and theorize this popular forensic gaze.