¿Cómo se debe realizar un retrato judicial?

Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) trabajó para el Servicio de identificación judicial iniciando el uso de la «antropometría descriptiva», conjunto de datos que constituyen la ficha personal de todo individuo que permite, llegado el caso, identificarlo. En 1888, fue nombrado jefe del servicio fotográfico de la Prefectura de Policía de París. Su obra, La Photographie judiciaire (1890), consagra el método de la «antropometría» con el que se inicia la ficha descriptiva con el doble retrato, de frente y de perfil (ya utilizado en antropología) y permitiendo una descripción muy precisa (nariz, ojos, orejas...) para la confección del «retrato hablado». El uso de la fotografía para fines judiciales y policiales, que se remonta al menos al fichaje de los Partidarios de la Comuna francesa de 1871, no dejó de presentar polémicas y debates sobre su función real y su oportunidad (la fotografía recién fue obligatoria en los documentos de identidad a partir de octubre de 1940). El texto de Bertillon que proponemos aquí no es sólo una justificación de la importancia de su método; abre perspectivas sobre la naturaleza del retrato, la semejanza, la memorización de los trazos, las modificaciones debidas a la vejez presentando, con una fría lucidez, la codificación descriptiva del individuo.Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociale

How to humiliate and shame: A reporter's guide to the power of the mugshot

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Social Semiotics, 24(1), 56-87, 2014, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/The judicial photograph – the “mugshot” – is a ubiquitous and instantly recognisable form, appearing in the news media, on the internet, on book covers, law enforcement noticeboards and in many other mediums. This essay attempts to situate the mugshot in a historical and theoretical context to explain the explicit and implicit meaning of the genre as it has developed, focussing in particular on their use in the UK media in late modernity. The analysis is based on the author's reflexive practice as a journalist covering crime in the national news media for 30 years and who has used mugshots to illustrate stories for their explicit and specific content. The author argues that the visual limitations of the standardised “head and shoulders” format of the mugshot make it a robust subject for analysing the changing meaning of images over time. With little variation in the image format, arguments for certain accreted layers of signification are easier to make. Within a few years of the first appearance of the mugshot form in the mid-19th century, it was adopted and adapted as a research tool by scientists and criminologists. While the positivist scientists claimed empirical objectivity we can now see that mugshots played a part in the construction of subjective notions of “the other”, “the lesser” or “sub-human” on the grounds of class, race and religion. These dehumanising ideas later informed the theorists and bureaucrats of National Socialist ideology from the 1920s to 1940s. The author concludes that once again the mugshot has become, in certain parts of the media, a signifier widely used to exclude or deride certain groups. In late modernity, the part of the media that most use mugshots – the tabloid press and increasingly tabloid TV – is part of a neo-liberal process that, in a conscious commercial appeal to the paying audience, seeks to separate rather than unify wider society

Terrorism, governmentality and the simulated city: the Boston Marathon bombing and the search for suspect two

This article examines the online circulation of a photograph of the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings taken by David Green, a Boston Marathon runner. The photograph fortuitously captured an image of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger Tsarnaev brother, running from the scene. Initially, Tsarnaev went unnoticed by online message board users and FBI investigators – he was just another face in the urban crowd. However, after he was identified as suspect two, he emerged in the photograph as the figure of terror, the condensed embodiment of the spectacular attack, and thus as a spectre, a figure whose appearance in the archive of the past haunts the future. The author examines how this spectral emergence simultaneously reveals the attack terrorism launches against everyday mediations and how everyday mediations respond to terrorist spectacle. He argues that photography sustains vernacular practices that also support the practices of urban governmentality. Understanding urban governmentality thus requires attending to the urban archive of visual mediation in which the relationships between past and present, image and reality, and surveillance and spectacle are always contingent and open to revision