Rouge Gallery. New York Police Station. July 1909. Photographer Unknown. Photograph taken from the George Grantham Bain Collection from the United States Library of Congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rogues_gallery.jpg
Photography has been utilized in identify and categorizing criminals as early as the 1840's. Police utilized daguerrotypes to take portraits of perpetual offenders for what came to be known as "Rouge Galleries." Above, we see a Rouge Gallery from a New York police station in 1909. The daguerrotype technology allowed for law enforcement to not only document criminals and their acts as well as be able to identify criminals when they commit multiple crimes. However, it was not until 1851 when Fredrick Scott Archer, an amateur photographer in Britain, created the Wet Plate Collodion Process. The Wet Plate process allowed for the possibility of making multiple prints from glass negatives, and it turn stimulated the production and distribution of criminal portraits. This was arguably the beginning of the "big brother" surveillance concerns of the public. Peter Hamilton writing in the, Beautiful and the Damned, explains photographic identification of criminals as, "a mode of surveillance through photography in which faces are captured in order to classify and control them within an archive or 'database'." Hamilton's ideas have been continually proven accurate with the advent of new photographic or video technologies continuously replacing the former.
Photo lineup in a Dallas Police Headquarters. http://www.npr.org/2011/07/06/137652142/to-prevent-false-ids-police-lineups-get-revamped.
Over 100 years after its infiltration into the legal system, photographic identification in the legal system is far from fool proof, even calling it justice is controversial. The technologies used to capture photographs will (likely) never be able to fulfill the desire for immediacy fully. Nothing can escape being in the present moment, the human brain can only hold a memory so well; even when it is being helped along by a photograph. That helping along is exactly what the idea behind a photo lineup is, an example of such being pictured above. A photo lineup is used to help identify a criminal; a witness to the crime will be shown multiple portrait style photographs of individuals who have similar appearances and the idea being that the witness can pick out the picture of the suspected accomplice. Yet, this very rarely works as it is intended. In fact, according to the American Judicature Society, misidentification by eyewitnesses was the leading cause of wrongful conviction in more than 75 percent of the first 183 DNA exonerations in the United States. Perhaps, Susan Sontag's views that, "Photographs furnish evidence...the camera record incriminates." is a truth that needs to be better evaluated when it comes to putting innocent men and women behind bars for no more of a reason than the lack of immediacy in photographs.
http://www.gait.ecs.soton.ac.uk/database/images/still_photo_examples/011z029pf.jpg. The digital camera used to take the stills was a Sony DSC-F505V. University of South Hampton.
Photographic technologies are ever evolving to help advance and propel the legal system. An instance of this is pictured above. The above photograph was taken while research was being done for the newest form of photographic identification technology was being created by the FBI, the Automatic Gait Recognition for Human ID at a Distance Program. This technology will allow for any member with access to be able identify individuals from far distances with a photographic radar gun, similar to the ones used to catch speeding cars. The technology will document and be able to read individual gait differences and use that data to identify people. The idea that someone's movements, as supposed to appearances which is what has been used in the past, can be remediated through a technology and then remediated again into a database of identities would make some a little nervous. In this instance, the medium proves the power of photographic technologies more so than the messages itself.
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