Evidence, Truth, and Order Tagg, John. "Evidence, Article Review

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Evidence, Truth, and Order

Tagg, John. "Evidence, Truth and Order: A Means of Surveillance" From Visual Culture: The Reader. Edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. New York: Sage, 1999, pp. 244-273. Originally published as Tagg, John. "A Means of Surveillance: Photograph as Evidence in Law," in John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Evidence, Truth, and Order. London: Macmillan, 1988, pp. 66-102.

When confronted with an article entitled "Evidence, Truth, and Order: A Means of Surveillance," a reader unacquainted with the rest of the photographer and critics John Tagg's work or the authors' other writings on the subject of his art might assume that his written work to follow the title would center purely upon notions of the criminal justice system pertaining to evidence and the establishment of truth, viewed with the electronic eye of mechanized surveillance. However, Tagg, a photographer, is mainly concerned with the photographic art specifically of the studio and the museum, not of the justice system, although his theories pertain to issues of the prison house and justice as well as to art. Tagg in his essay is not only concerned with photographic evidence as deployed in the law courts and the ability of those photographs to make truth claims for juries and justices but of the implications of photographic representations in law for artists and photography as well.

In all of his writings and works, John Tagg is concerned with photography's ability to open up a pictorial eye upon the world.

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Is the photographic eye, asks Tagg, seeing the 'real' world in an unvarnished way, in the language of objective legal evidence or truth? Rather, Tagg would suggest, instead of providing an objective or impartial gaze upon life, photography, supposedly the most objective of the pictorial arts, merely transmits the vision and the limited perspective of the photographer. What a photographer includes within a frame (and leaves out of the frame) establishes only a subjective truth claim and an artificial order upon the limitless protoplasmic formless quality of life. The surveillance of photography may indeed by the watching of a voyeur. But even a voyeur in real life chooses what he or she wishes to spy on. The selection of the voyeur to spy upon intimate or criminal matters says as much about the spy's preoccupations as the subject of the espying eye. Likewise, the photographer's selection of a subject says as much about the photographer as it does about whom is being spied upon.

The danger of photography, though, says Tagg, is that the impression that the medium of the art of photography conveys is that the medium creates the impression that it merely is giving a 'real' glimpse of life in an unvarnished and objective manner. This is particularly dangerous when a picture is taken as evidence that a crime was committed, regardless of….....

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