Perpetrator images as documentary, evidentiary, and affective

Two-day workshop.

Perpetrators have long contributed to the visual documentation of their crimes, from Nazi images of the Holocaust to lynching photographs in the US South. At times, perpetrators have gone to great lengths to record their own activities and to photograph their victims, as we have seen in Cambodia (S-21), Syria (the Caesar files), Iraq (Abu Ghraib), and Guatemala (National Police Archive), among too many other examples.

As camera technologies have advanced and proliferated, new forms of these images have emerged, including live-streamed terror attacks, bodycam and dashcam footage of police encounters with civilians, footage generated in the course of operating weapons, phone camera accounts of wartime atrocities made by fighters themselves, and surveillance images of various sorts. These images document violence, yet often the images are part of that very violence. While serving numerous purposes for the perpetrators, these images are also repurposed for justice and accountability, collective memory, and truth-finding. At the same time, they pose important political and ethical dilemmas when considering how to store, share, show, view or even delete such images. 

This two-day workshop will gather a multidisciplinary range of practitioners – from lawyers to artists, journalists, and academics – to discuss how we might understand different forms of perpetrator-created images and how we can engage ethically with them for journalistic, legal, and advocacy purposes.

Programme

Thursday September 12

Friday September 13

Saturday September 14