The augmented image as evidence
Published on
In this essay for the Carnets du BAL no. 11, Francesco Sebregondi draws on Index’s experience to analyse the conditions and operations required for images to serve as evidence today – through the prism of controversies over police violence.
Sometimes images exist and circulate: a video filmed by a witness, a CCTV recording, for instance. Most of the time, events happen with no camera running – or at least, after the fact, the images are missing. Either way, images alone do not amount to proof. One need only think of the video of the killing of Nahel, whose legal characterisation is still disputed today. Drawing on the experience of investigating on, with, and through images, the essay sets out the notion of the “augmented image”: a frame that extends beyond the single image to take in everything produced by the work of extracting and reconstructing data from raw footage. In a world where images are distrusted, only a deep, cross-cutting, and collective engagement with them can challenge the power relations that shape the construction of a public truth.
The volume
The essay appears in L’image à l’épreuve des machines, the eleventh volume of the Carnets du BAL, alongside contributions by Ada Ackerman, Alice Leroy, Antonio Somaini, Trevor Paglen, Félix Tréguer, Nicolas Gourault, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Éléonore Weber, Raphaël Dallaporta, Nicole Starosielski, Teresa Faucon, Yves Citton, Grégory Chatonsky, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, and Gwenola Wagon. The collection examines the images produced by machines – surveillance, recognition, modelling – which have spilled beyond the military-industrial field to pervade every sphere of existence, and what becomes of sensory experience in the age of algorithms.
“Perceptions” series, Les Presses du réel, with LE BAL and the Centre national des arts plastiques. ISBN 978-2-37896-423-8.