Listening to Images

“the power of the state’s criminal system against itself … hijacking the booking process, enabling the state to produce its own strategic blunder, its own tragic actions.” They enact instead powerful forms of subversion. “They give us a chance to take the measure of these men and women in the very heat of battle, and perhaps to take measure of ours

Burned by hand into its face were four unsettling words: “The Book of Innocents.”

The tense of this haptic temporality resounds in the anteriority of the future subjunctive: “If you are ever released, you will still be ours.”

They are images created to capture subjects deemed guilty and sentenced to serve, to facilitate capture in the case of future crimes or possible flight.

The increasing popularity of Bertillonage5 and the rigid rules he created to systematize and categorize the criminal body fueled a proliferation of convict photographs. The resulting emphasis on standardizing and controlling the photographic image, coupled with a desire to delineate convict photos from respectable photographic portraits, initiated

Like the passport photo and their original exemplar, Alphonse Bertillon’s mug shot, these images were also made to identify, classify, isolate, and distinguish.

Convict photos are a genre of identification photography that Susanne Regener describes as “compelled photos”1—images taken without the permission of their subjects.

This album and the photos it contains were neither held nor caressed by their sitters or their loved ones. They enjoyed no haptic relation to it, for they never had access to or possession of the images that reside on its pages.

multiple forms of contact: visual contact (seeing), physical contact (touching), psychic contact (feeling), and, most counterintuitively of all, the sonic contact that I have described as a frequency that requires us to listen to as well as view images.