The Forensic Imaginary: Visual Media and Evidentiary Culture

Tory Jeffay
Film & Media
UC Berkeley

My dissertation examines the emergence of photography and film as tools of evidence within policing and the law in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in an attempt to better understand the role that visual evidence plays in our current moment. While scholars following Foucault have understood the history of law and policing’s relationship to photography as an oppressive application of realist technology, I show that this history is an oversimplification that ignores the actual practices of those employing photography and film in the investigation and prosecution of crime. Attending to these historical practices reveals a different regime of sense that has long been in competition with photographic realism, a regime I call forensic. These imaging practices have engendered a forensic imaginary, a belief that there is more knowledge stored within the image than initially meets the eye. This dissertation traces a genealogy of the forensic imaginary through four moments in the emergence of visual evidence from the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, analyzing how the use of the camera within the institutions of law and policing has shaped the popular imagination of photographic imagery’s broader epistemological claims.