Surveillance Porrtraits (January 2021)

Outdoor Security Camera, CamHi Application

Surveillance Portraits considers the difference between analog and digital surveillance, photo, and moving image archives. This expansive digital surveillance collection without the limitations posed by the physicality of the nineteenth-century archive is largely absent in the new digital space where the “body in the digital archive exists as a site of constant surveillance and as something that is always potentially criminal”(82). Surveillance Portraits is an ongoing series where participants spend 2 minutes in the dark confessing to a wireless surveillance camera. The participant has an opportunity to confess at the expense of becoming a surveilled object.

In the chapter “Potential Criminality: The Body in the Digital Archive” from Capturing the Criminal Image: From Mug Shot to Surveillance Society, Jonathan Finn investigates how the act of representing and watching is central to modern law enforcement. The development of police photography in the nineteenth-century foregrounds a critique of three identification practices that are fundamental to current police work: fingerprinting, DNA analysis, and surveillance programs and databases. However, contemporary law enforcement practices position the body as something that is potentially criminal. The collection and archiving of identification data-which consist today of much more than photographs or fingerprints-reflect a reconceptualization of the body itself. And once archived, identification data can be interpreted and reinterpreted according to highly mutable and sometimes dubious conceptions of crime and criminality.