Page 73 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

64 Christina Spiesel

because it moves, it is even more lifelike. The photographic picture in general
is a very complex object because it participates in all three elements of the
Peircean sign triad. At first glance the photograph is a Peircean iconic sign,
because it overwhelmingly resembles the surface characteristics of that which
it depicts; nevertheless, ―it is directly and physically influenced by its object,
and is therefore an index; and lastly it requires a learned process of ―reading‖
to understand it‖[Huening] which brings it into the realm of mediation and
symbolic (Peircean) structures. Interestingly, while Peirce‘s system articulates
the reasons for photography‘s power, Peirce himself failed to see his own
errors when he limited photography‘s power to the indexical. [Kibbey, pp.
132-164].
Perhaps it is this semiotic triple play that gives the photograph its
particular power over us as a medium of exchange. While it is true of all
semiosis that it is dynamic and not neatly fixed, this appeal to the entire basic
Peircean triad of the relationship of the sign to its object must confer extra
credibility on the photograph. I would suggest that it is precisely because of
this power that we are so unable to disentangle our perception that it reflects
reality of some kind from the proposition that what it shows IS reality. That is,
at first glance, without training, we miss entirely that we are looking at a
picture of reality that has been transformed by a technology that has
characteristics of its own. The camera is being operated by someone or
something that has a reason for taking the picture. (Note how this is
analogically like the common sense construction that if a person is arrested,
they must be guilty; both suppositions have the potential to lead to serious
miscarriages of justice.) The picture, in turn, is then deployed as a sign in a
context. Tasers equipped with video and used by the police are made to record
the actions of the person using the gun in context for a record of what
happened, as evidence. Once made, the recording can be used by supervisors
to monitor the behavior of officers (police, prison guards, etc.) and it may or
may not become part of a legal proceeding. Monitoring can result in
exoneration from culpability; it adds information to what might otherwise be a
―he said/she said‖ situation of competing and difficult to verify claims. But
once out in the world on YouTube, these recordings become a part of a larger
conversation.
As an aspect of the media culture arising from digital technologies, ―the
photographic‖ is now a sign itself deployed in ever more complex mash-ups of
data from multiple sources and the still photograph is now a nearly infinitely
malleable set of pixels [Ritchin]. The public is beginning to understand that
the same thing can be true of video data. The cultural understanding of the