Page 72 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

The Fate of the Iconic Sign: Taser Video 63

history [Eisenman]. This, too, is the cultural ground that tasercam images will
evoke. But unlike art in museums, tasercam in courtrooms will be part of the
administration of justice and its truth, like all forms of evidence, must be
actively tested. So, I argue, we need to be concerned about our ability to take
on these compelling video records.

WE CAN BE FOOLED BY OUR OWN MEDIA HABITS

Another factor that normalizes the tasercam picture is that these videos are
the product of photography, a medium that has its own critical history defining
it as a violent form of expression both because it ―takes‖ its subject‘s ―skins‖
or surface appearance and because of the behavior of the person taking the
picture. Photographer Bill Jay asserts that the ― single most consistent attribute
of the twentieth century photographer is his willingness, and even desire, to
violate any and all social conventions of good behavior in order to take a
picture.‖ [Jay, p.1]. [Sontag] [Vettel-becker]. Before Tasers, the close cultural
association between making the picture and producing the effect on a living
being has perhaps its most extreme manifestation in the 1960 film Peeping
Tom, directed by Michael Powell, a horror film in which a photographer
murders women with a blade concealed in his tripod while filming their dying
moments. Surely this is a close precursor to what we see in tasercam video
[Feigensen]. Tasercam videos do not end with the death of the victim (or we
are not given that portion of the tape) but they come close to the low budget
snuff film in underground violent pornography, which surely, some finders of
fact may well have seen.
How do the facts of photography as a medium complicate our
understanding of video? First, and common to all photography, is that we have
a reading problem – photographs look real. Second, the social context has
shifted dramatically: anyone can make quite good photographs now and they
are easy to disseminate. Non-gatekeepers are making pictures to create
alternative histories of public and private events; they are ―talking‖ back to
power. Official sources are using photography (as they always have) as a
weapon in info wars. Our reading problem when it comes to photography
arises from the fact that a photograph looks like something we might have
observed with our own eyes were we but there. We are wired with the
cognitive default setting that we automatically believe that something that
looks real, actually is or was real. [Reeves & Nass]. Video represents ―the
real‖ because it looks real in the same way as pictures from other cameras and