Page 62 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Fate of the Iconic Sign: Taser Video 53

agree because they describe a commonly shared perceptual reality captured by
a mechanism that we believe has no desires of its own: the camera.
Photographs are commonly understood to have been caused by the reality
before the camera, light carrying information and imprinting it on a sensitive
surface that can then be prepared for display. Consider this statement: ―
‗Photographs are traces left when objects causally interact with cameras, and
these elements can be preserved.‖ On the face of it this denies the frame of
human making and misses (as does Peirce) the propositional aspect of all
pictures.‖ [Hookway, p. 65].
Photographers know that this is a misconception but the general public
doesn‘t seem to share that awareness. Certainly the United States Supreme
Court is no different in this general attitude toward photography than was Elie
Weisel. Confronted with dashboard camera video evidence in the Scott v.
Harris case, Justice Scalia, writing for the Court declared, ―We are happy to
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allow the videotape to speak for itself.‖ [Scott] Generally, the Supreme Court
only reviews matters that pertain to the interpretation of the law. In Scott v.
Harris they were asked to decide a qualified immunity case that had never
actually gone to trial and so, unusually, the Court was confronted with
evidence, in this case copies of police car dashboard camera video tape of the
incident that brought about the filing of Harris‘ suit against Scott.
Implicit in Justice Scalia‘s assertion is that we will see and believe and
therefore agree with the Court‘s assessment of the case and its decision. Like
Weisel, the Court does not imagine that there can be substantive disagreement
in viewers‘ assessments of the meaning of the video evidence in their case(s).
An empirical study of public response to the Scott dashboard camera tape
showed that, while the majority agreed with the outcome of the case, believing
that the tape did reveal that the driver of the car was, in fact, driving too fast
and the police chase justified, the study responses did vary with political
attitudes of survey participants. [Kahan] My methodology does not make
empirical claims; it depends upon knowledge of the medium, how it is made,

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Justice Scalia is either unfamiliar with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ writing on photography
or doesn‘t agree with him. Oliver Wendell Holmes:“There is only one Coliseum or
Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,--representatives of
billions of pictures,--since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed
and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need
not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon
scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt
the cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the carcasses as of little worth.‖
[Holmes]. While acknowledging the role of the sun (light) in making the picture, Holmes
clearly saw both that people make photographs and that this activity was going to be
socially transformative.