Society and Photography

Gunning traces the development of photography as well as the evolution of the role of photography in his essay “Circulation, Mobility, Modernity, and the Body.” As an instrument of modernity, photography played a role similar to that of the railroad and conveyer belts by circulating impressions and indices of real objects. However, while billed as unbiased evidence and an incorruptible truth, photography was shown to be a “distorted” representation of our reality. In his discourse on police photographs, Gunning illustrates the early attempts of photographic distortion used by criminals in their portraits. The struggle to capture an objective image in criminal portraiture differs dramatically from the traditional role of portraits proposed by Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, early portraits conveyed a cult value in which the viewer develops a personal connection and becomes absorbed by the photograph. In contrast, Gunning’s criminal portraits were meant to be seen as evidence, resulting in their mass distribution and reproduction. Due to its mechanistic nature and as a result of its use as “evidence,” photographs begin to lose its subjectivity in its ability to illicit personal responses and become, to the public, a form of proof acceptable even in a court of law. However, despite its common acceptance as proof, photography and cinema are incapable of capturing the full “truth” behind the recorded event due to the discrepancies between reality and the narrative created by the viewer based on his or her own experiences and prejudices. The result is that criminals are often more afraid of being photographed than committing the actual crime. Therefore, Gunning shows that there is not a simple relationship between photography and society. Rather, society’s perception of photographed individuals and the development of photography to shape these perceptions both influenced one another in this era of technological transformation.