[ePub] Selling Art Without Galleries: Toward Making a Living from Your Art by Daniel Grant in Arts-Photography

Description

At the beginning of the twentieth century; criminals; both alleged and convicted; were routinely photographed and fingerprinted-and these visual representations of their criminal nature were archived for possible future use. At the beginning of the twenty-first century; a plethora of new tools-biometrics; DNA analysis; digital imagery; and computer databases-similarly provide new ways for representing the criminal.Capturing the Criminal Image traces how the act of representing-and watching-is central to modern law enforcement. Jonathan Finn analyzes the development of police photography in the nineteenth century to foreground a critique of three identification practices that are fundamental to current police work: fingerprinting; DNA analysis; and surveillance programs and databases. He shows these practices at work by examining specific police and border-security programs; including several that were established by the U.S. government after the terrorist attacks of September 11; 2001. Contemporary law enforcement practices; he argues; position the body as something that is potentially criminal.As Finn reveals; 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.