Images, Ethics, Technology

Sharrona Pearl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138935136
• eBook ISBN: 9781317388630
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Images, Ethics, Technology explores the changing ethical implications of images and the ways they are communicated and understood.

It emphasises how images change not only through their modes of representation, but through our relationship to them. In order to understand images, we must understand how they are produced, communicated, and displayed.

Each of the 14 essays chart the relationship to technology as part of a larger complex social and cultural matrix, highlighting how these relations constrain and enable notions of responsibility with respect to images and what they represent. They demonstrate that as technology develops and changes, the images themselves change, not just with respect to content, but in the very meanings and indices they produce.

This is a collection that not only asks: who speaks for the art? But also: who speaks for the witnesses, the cameras, the documented, the landscape, the institutional platforms, the taboos, those wishing to be forgotten, those being seen and the experience of viewing itself?

Images, Ethics, Technology is ideal for advanced level students and researchers in media and communications, visual culture and cultural studies.

Part I

Authorizing images

Chapter 1

Introduction

Interrogating the authority of the image

Nora Draper

In August 2014, a poignant question about the nature of image ownership arose across social media outlets: If a monkey takes a selfie, who owns the copyright? The question was not hypothetical. In 2011, British photographer David Slater had traveled to Indonesia to take pictures of the local wildlife. During the course of his trip, a crested black macaque stole his equipment and took hundreds of pictures of itself. The images included a particularly beautiful shot that was reproduced and entered by the Wikimedia Foundation into a bank of public domain images to be used free of charge. Slater, who often self-finances his photography trips, has argued that the image is not in the public domain. He contends that he owns the image copyright because the photo was taken with his camera during the course of his work as a nature photographer. Wikimedia – and a number of copyright experts – disagree.¹

This debate is not trivial – nor do its implications reside solely on the peripheries of copyright law. Deliberations about the nature of ownership and use of digital images raise important questions about the ethics of image possession, the cultures of distribution and circulation, and the nature of mediated witnessing in the digital era. We tend to be comfortable with the idea that an image’s authority is derived from the intentions and credibility of its producer. In a digital moment, however, the experience of mechanically produced pictures, recombinant images, and suspect sourcing, assumptions about the supremacy of the image have been dredged out of their comfortable, if tenuous, resting spots.

In his essay on witnessing, John Durham Peters eloquently articulates the tensions implicit in the widely used term. “Witnessing,” he argues, “is an intricately tangled practice. It raises questions of truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying, and the trustworthiness of perception.”² Peters describes witnessing as simultaneously passive (seeing) and active (giving testimony), further noting the gulf that separates the two components of the practice. This perceived void between seeing and saying reveals concerns regarding the limits of witnessing. The role of the media, which act as proxy witnesses through the translation and transmission of distant images, has often been examined for its effects on viewers.³

Media events theory describes how broadcast television creates conditions that allow people to understand the media’s observations as their own.⁴ The “liveness” of the mediated spectacle has allowed witnessing to become a domestic act.⁵ Some question, however, whether such secondhand viewing allows an individual to lay claims as to having borne witness to an event. Particularly acute are concerns about the translation of emotion through images and how this affects individual reactions to misery.⁶ How does an obligation of intervention that one may feel when witnessing an event in person respond to the intercession of a third-party testimony? Some academic research has offered that responses to distant suffering involve superficial charity⁷ and, eventually, compassion fatigue.⁸

The unresolved status of images as authoritative sites for witnessing generates further apprehension regarding the nature of mediated observation and testimony. Debates regarding the supposed objectivity of the image and its corresponding authority have a long history. While discourse arising in the late nineteenth century privileged the objectivity of the scientific image,⁹ later voices questioned these claims, noting that human intervention and cultural context are implicit in all image creation.¹⁰ The rise of citizen journalism has led to a reexamination regarding the integration and contextualization of images from unvetted sources by news organizations.¹¹ Often, these debates hinge on a strained relationship between the authenticity of the amateur and the authority of the professional.

Situated within this critical intellectual tradition, each of the chapters in this section explores the role of the image as a site of authority within the context of mediated witnessing. Each chapter tackles important questions about how the rights and responsibilities of viewership are nested in an increasingly complex notion of images as evidence and challenged by gatekeepers that regulate their consumption.

The 1964 Kitty Genovese murder in New York City is familiar to us for its production of a set of anxieties around the bystander. Reports of the event noted that up to 38 witnesses watched as a young woman was stabbed repeatedly and bled to death. None of those bystanders intervened or called for help. Despite reinterpretations of the event that revised both the number of bystanders and their actions, the reporting of Kitty Genovese’s murder contributed to the construction of a theory of the “bystander effect,” which posits that the more people who witness something bad happening to another person, the less likely any of them will be to intervene. Applications of this theory often parallel concerns that individuals are unmoved by images of suffering. These theories suggest that, in aggregate, individuals who see a crime in progress are able to distance themselves and transfer the obligations of intervention to others.

Carrie A. Rentschler draws directly on the cultural and academic legacies of the Genovese murder to examine the construction of the bystander as a failed citizen. In noting that contemporary bystanders are often condemned for their use of camera phones to document rather than intercede, Rentschler offers an alternative framework for understanding such forms of mediated witnessing. She offers the role of bystander witnesses as a performance of active intervention and characterizes their behavior as disrupting the existing relational power of the actors.

Through an examination of the use of new visual imaging and archiving technologies in police work, Kelly Gates explores the ways in which modern investigatory and evidentiary practices have been transformed. Looking specifically at the explosion of commercial products that offer ways to enhance forensic video evidence and the new labor conditions they produce, Gates describes an emerging belief in “computational objectivity,” which privileges the neutrality of technologically mediated observation over the imperfect and selective perception of the human witness. Just as Peters notes the credibility of scientific instruments to witness has been established through their “indifference to human interests,”¹² Gates observes that the promotion of forensic technologies generates expectations around authenticity and credibility at the same time as they obscure the role of human intervention in both the construction and operation of the technology and in the interpretation of its output.

In the relation of her experiences as a would-be expert witness in an obscenity trial, Constance Penley explores the implications for due process when members of a jury are asked to interpret mediated images based on their relational qualities. Of course, decisions of jury members always rest on interpretations of mediated evidence, whether it is through an eyewitness, police investigator, or CCTV footage. In the case Penley presents, however, the images are mediated in two additional ways. The first is through the decision of a judge regarding which images are viewed by the jury and under what conditions. The second is the presentation of “similar” imagery that is expected to stand in for the original pieces on the basis of perceived generic resemblance. Penley explores the implications of mediation when images are stripped of their content (and context) and miscategorized through their sameness.

In his chapter on the contentious relocation of the Barnes Foundation Art Collection from its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, Larry Gross discusses the roles and responsibilities that befall the custodians of images. The experience of any art gallery is mediated through the particular view of its curator. This is particularly true in the case of the Barnes Foundation, which houses a collection that – owing to the particular tastes of its benefactor – is at once astonishingly resonant and deeply idiosyncratic. In interrogating the debates that slowed and eventually guided the collection’s move to its present location, Gross examines the simultaneous role of the collector as an authority on the value of the art in his collection and as the guardian of access. In reflecting on how the consumption of collections is mediated through the eye of the collector and the institutional forces that shape access, Gross examines how the authority conferred by ownership shapes the public experience of art.

Together, these chapters examine how questions of authority and objectivity, responsibility and ownership, are negotiated through acts of mediated witnessing. They explore how the cultural meaning of images – whether they are grainy surveillance videos, footage from a cellphone camera, highly produced pornography, or prestige art collections – is shaped when they are observed secondhand. By locating perceived authority alternatively in the expert (police, judge, or collector), amateur (bystander), or machine (digital CCTV), each author queries the stakes for contemporary practices of observation and the challenging role of the mediated image as a site of authority.

Notes

1 Jordan Weissmann, “If a Monkey Takes a Selfie, Who Owns the Copyright?,” Slate, August 6, 2014, www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/08/06/monkey_selfie_who_owns_the_copyright.html.

2 John Durham Peters, “Witnessing,” Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001): 707–724.

3 Luc Boktanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, trans. Graham Burchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

4 Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

5 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London, I.B. Tauris, 2000).

6 Jean Seaton, “Watching the World – Seeing, Feeling – Understanding?,” The Political Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2001): 498–502.

7 Slavoj Žiž ek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008).

8 Keith Tester, Compassion, Morality and the Media (Buckingham, UK: Open University Press, 2001).

9 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128.

10 Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1961).

11 Mervi Pantti and Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, “Transparency and Trustworthiness: Strategies for Incorporating Amateur Photography into News Discourse,” in Amateur Images and Global News, ed. Kari Andén-Papadopoulos and Mervi Pantti (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 99–112.

12 Peters, “Witnessing ,” 715.

Chapter 2

Technologies of bystanding

Learning to see like a bystander

Carrie A. Rentschler

Over the last few years, parts of Montreal’s infrastructure have been giving way: hunks of concrete drop from salt-saturated highway overpasses; one overpass collapsed, dropping cars onto the freeway below; a cement slab detached from a downtown high-rise hotel and c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Images, Ethics, Technology
• Shaping Inquiry in Culture, Communication and Media Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Relating Images
• PART I Authorizing Images
• PART II Memorializing Images
• PART III Embodying Images
• Index