This platform grew out of a research project we conducted in 2023 on the relationship between law and its images, and their desired and actual effect on the public. The research project, Depicting law, Streaming Justice, funded with the support of the Socio Legal Studies Association (SLSA) allowed us to conduct fieldwork in the Supreme Courts of India and the UK. During the project we found ourselves surrounded by never-ending research questions, curious leads, keen colleagues, and unusual connections that brought together different times and different places. As it progressed, the project highlighted the need for a network of multidisciplinary and multimethod approaches to explore the complex relationship between images, courts and society, going well beyond the current literature and available methods of inquiry.
We found that the methods available to the academy as an institution, where confined forms of knowledge production (episteme) are usually restricted to very narrowly defined forms of text production (techne) largely failed to discuss relations between visual productions of justice-making (sketches, photography, films, CCTV recordings, social media posts, web-streams, comics and other means of production and distribution of images), the society (classes, masses, bodies, genders, races...) and the courts (domestic and international courts, public, civil, political, show, televised, criminal trials, walls, stairs and ornaments of courts, digital courts surrounded by algorithms). The main reason, perhaps, for this omission, is the fact that images have something that exceeds the words, and what they can reveal may not be always translatable to the method and medium of the legal courts and the academy.
Nevertheless, the changing relation between the visual forms of justice-making, society and the courts lead to the perpetual reinvention of concepts (transparency, open justice, efficiency, dignity, privacy, sovereignty and so on), and renegotiation of power between media, elites, masses, courts and other institutions, states and in the age of social media, also the content producers and consumers. The way we see and reproduce the world changes with the world around us. In addition to this primary political nature of images and perspective, there is also a second role of them. In the words of Walter Benjamin;
As soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionised. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.
The image in its modern forms (digitalised images, photography, film, recording, graphics, etc.) is infinitely reproducible, thus transcending its indexical nature and creating its own truth value. On the one hand, the big media try to use reproducible images for mass consumption and for their political agenda. On the other hand, institutions respond with the laws of copyright and contempt, with subtext and voice-over, or with the direct legal instruments of libel and anti-terrorism laws. Despite the state and the media, however, images keep reminding us of forgotten ways of seeing, and invade the future of the communication. Ariela Azoulay's highlights the civic potential of images that keeps on returning in every look:
the photograph is usually thought of as the final product of an event, even though the event of photography continues each time the image is observed by a viewer.
We want to give priority to the images on this platform, to let the images speak louder, to talk with the images. In this way, we want to be part of that civic relationship and build a community where contributors learn to look together at justice, at the courts and legal cases in different geographies and times through images. Towards this end, we invite contributors to think about images, law and the courts, as broadly or as narrowly as they wish.
There is a long list of thinkers who have tried to reveal the socio-political background of seeing or the gaze, aesthetics behind the political, how it is embedded in gendered and racialised systems of power, where perception reproduces relations in different ways. What we see and how we see reflects a historical accumulation and interplay of domination and resistance, but also world-building and storytelling. Images of justice and courts, cases and legal struggles does the same; they reveal what other forms of communication can’t. We hope to create a platform to capture the contingent and the unexpected, the excess in the image, which is an event in every encounter, forever.
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