Listening to Images

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

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.

attachment, identification photos are not produced at the desire of their sitters. They are images required of or imposed upon them by empire, science, or the state. The unexceptional format of identification photos and the routinized nature of bureaucratic images frequently lead to a failure to read or a blanket dismissal of them altogether, as we

Confession #1: This archive of images vexes me. They are photographs that affect me and images in which I see a multitude of things. I’m conflicted by the beauty I see in them, perplexed by the quiet introspection they so hauntingly depict.

This book proposes a haptic mode of engaging the sonic frequencies of photographs. It offers an alternate take on “watching” photos that materializes their transfigurations, albeit not in the form of statements of fact or as narratives of transit or mobility.

quiet must not be conflated with silence.

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

Here again, listening to images is constituted as a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register.

identification photography. These photos are produced predominantly for the regulatory needs of the state or the classificatory imperatives of colonization.