Chapter 1

Opening the lens

Cultural criminology and the image
Keith Hayward

Do you want to acquire power through the image? Then you will perish by the
return of the image
(Jean Baudrillard, 2005).

Five years ago now, in the edited collection Cultural Criminology Unleashed
(Ferrell et al., 2004), we commented that the true meaning of crime and crime
control was to be found not in the essential (and essentially false) factuality of
crime rates, but in the contested processes of symbolic display, cultural interpre-
tation, and representational negotiation. Images of crime, we claimed, were
becoming as real as crime and criminal justice itself , with mediated anticrime
campaigns, visually constructed crime waves, and media fabrications of counter-
cultural imagery all circulating in an endless spiral of meaning, a Mbius strip
of culture and everyday life (ibid: 34). At that time, our intention was to be
controversial; the goal being to play with the parameters of the discipline and
challenge the staid conventions of orthodox criminology. However, surveying the
world five years on, such proclamations appear less irreverent flights of futuro-
logical fancy and more commonsense observation. While the everyday experi-
ence of life in contemporary Western society may or may not be suffused with
crime, it is most certainly suffused with images and increasingly images of crime.
However, it is not just a case of image proliferation contemporary societys
keen sense of the visual demands that images also be both mutable and malleable.
Here the logic of speed (Virilio, 1986, 1991) meets liquidity of form, as images
bleed from one medium to the next. Uploaded and downloaded, copied and cross-
posted, Flickr-ed, Facebook-ed and PhotoShop-ped, the image today is as much
about porosity and transmutation as it is about fixity and representation. This,
of course, poses a question: what does the term image actually mean under
contemporary conditions?
The word image is utilized and etymologically defined in a number of ways.
However, from a pictorial perspective, image traditionally refers to a representa-
tion of the external form of an object. This remains the case, of course, but for the
purposes of this collection, we have deliberately sought to expand and enhance

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 2 Keith Hayward

the term. Just as cell phone photos migrate from street to screen and user-
generated-content websites set video clips loose from their origins, traditional
conceptual understandings of the term image are also set in motion. One such
example is the increasing interchangeability of the terms image and visual.
If the former relates to representation, then the latter (traditionally at least) relates
to seeing. However, consider our mass mediated society, what Appadurai
(1996: 35) calls the late modern Mediascape (that bundle of media that manu-
factures information and disseminates images via an ever expanding array of
digital technologies). Here, much of what we see is actually mediated by the
image. On the internet, for example, the photograph and the icon function as
navigational devices, allowing us to see virtual worlds and traverse the endless
pathways of cyberspace. Likewise, while TV, film, and video all incorporate
sound and broadcast technology, they are by definition primarily photographic
experiences. Hence the increasing use of terms such as visual culture1 or
imaged form as ways of explaining and understanding a world in which the
collective conscious is now shaped and manipulated by the digital image-making
machinery of the Mediascape.
This blurring of representation and seeing, of image and visual, is never more
apparent than when we consider how crime is imaged in contemporary society.
While mug shots, surveillance photographs, and newspaper pictures of notorious
criminals have long featured as part of the spectacle of crime and punishment
in modern society (see Carney, this volume). Today, as criminals videotape their
crimes and post them on YouTube, as security agents scrutinize the image-
making of criminals on millions of surveillance monitors around the world, as
insurrectionist groups upload video compilations (filmed from several angles) of
successful suicide bomb attacks and roadside IED (Improvized Explosive
AQ: Expansion. Device) detonations, as images of brutality and victimization pop up on office
OK?
computer screens and childrens mobile phones, as reality TV shows take the
viewer ever deeper inside the world of the beat cop and the prison setting, there
can be no other option but the development of a thoroughgoing visual criminology.
For some, such a visual criminology is already with us. After all, phrases like
images of and media constructions of are now common and commonly
accepted prefixes to conventional criminological categories such as policing and
prison studies. However, as I have stated elsewhere, [t]his disciplinary drift into
the realm of the image hardly constitutes an adequate visual criminology
Simply importing images into a discipline defined by words and numbers is in
fact likely to retard the development of a visual criminology, since it will leave
in place the ugly notion that written or numeric analysis can somehow penetrate

1 I use the term visual culture here in its general sense and not as it relates to the distinct subfield
of social and cultural study that draws together cultural studies, art history, philosophy, and critical
theory (see e.g. Mirzoeff, 1999; Dikovitskaya, 2006 for introductions to the academic discipline of
visual culture).

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 Opening the lens 3

the obfuscation, conquer the opaqueness, of the image (Ferrell, Hayward and
Young, 2008: 1846). Instead of simply studying images we need a new meth-
odological orientation towards the visual that is capable of encompassing mean-
ing, affect, situation, symbolic power and efficiency, and spectacle in the same
frame. This new approach must seek to fuse precise visual attentiveness with
politically charged analysis, to be as attuned to representation and style as it is to
the ways visual culture impacts on individual and collective behaviour. As David
Freedburg (1989, xxii) makes clear in his book The Power of Images: Studies in
the History and Theory of Response (itself a work that urges art historians to take
their analyses beyond traditional understandings of the image): We must con-
sider not only beholders symptoms and behaviours, but also the effectiveness,
efficacy, and vitality of images themselves; not only what beholders do, but also
what images appear to do; not only what people do as a result of their relationship
with imaged form, but also what they expect imaged form to achieve, and why
they have such expectations at all.
In keeping with such a philosophy, this book aims to help cultural criminolo-
gists go beyond simple analyses of the static image/picture and develop the theo-
retical and methodological tools needed to understand the dynamic force and
power of visual culture. Such a task is now urgent. Contemporary visual repre-
sentations of crime, transgression, and punishment take us far beyond the realm
of the criminal justice system or law and order politics; even beyond established
understandings of the medias role as a storehouse of illicit excitement, a ready
resource for the voyeuristic consumption of violence and tragedy. Today, our
world might best be described as a highly mediated crime fest, where the visual
representation of crime and punishment plays out in reality TV theatres of the
absurd and mediated spectacles of punitiveness. To paraphrase a famous quote by
Gianni Vattimo and Wolfgang Welsch, over the last few years, the (visual) media
has changed from simply conveying information or telling entertaining stories
about crime, to actually shaping and producing its reality (Vattimo and Welsch,
1998: 7).
This is exactly the point at which cultural criminology enters the frame. Over
the last decade or so, cultural criminology has emerged as a distinct theoretical,
methodological, and interventionist approach that situates crime, criminality, and
control squarely in the context of cultural dynamics (see e.g. Ferrell and Sanders,
1995; Presdee, 2000; Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008). From this view, crime
and the agencies and institutions of crime control operate as cultural enterprises
that is, as richly symbolic endeavours created out of ongoing human interaction
and power relations. As such, they must be read in terms of the contested mean-
ings they carry; they must be interrogated as key social sites in which rules are
created and broken, in which moral entrepreneurship, political innovation, and
experiential resistance intersect. In undertaking this interrogation, cultural crimi- AQ: Ferrell, 1997
nology often focuses theoretically on situated meaning and constructed social is not listed in
identity, and methodologically on forms of ethnography predicated on the Reference.
Weberian tradition of verstehende sociologie (see Ferrell, 1997). However, while

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 4 Keith Hayward

early cultural criminological research emanating from the United States focused
predominantly on rich, indexical cultural accounts of marginal deviant groups
(e.g. Ferrell, 1993/1996; Hamm, 1995: see Ferrell and Hamm, 1998), more
recently, it has expanded its focus to include space, place and cultural geography;
the ongoing transformations and fluctuations associated with hypercapitalism;
the vicissitudes of power, resistance and state control; concepts of risk and
embodied practice, and a whole host of other areas. The strength of the cultural
approach, then, is the way it seeks to tackle the subject of crime and criminaliza-
tion from a variety of new perspectives and academic disciplines. In effect, as
I have stated elsewhere, its remit is to keep turning the kaleidoscope on the
way we think about crime, and importantly, the legal and societal responses to
rule-breaking (Hayward and Young, 2007: 103). In all of this, cultural criminol-
ogy attempts to reorient criminology to contemporary social and cultural changes,
and so to imagine a post or late modern theory of crime and control. In this
regard, cultural criminology conceptualizes many transgressive behaviours as
attempts to resolve internal conflicts that are themselves spawned by the contra-
dictions and peculiarities of contemporary life; put in different terms, cultural
criminology seeks to fuse a phenomenology of contemporary transgression with
a socio-cultural analysis of late modern culture (Hayward, 2004: 9).
Concepts such as situated meaning, symbolic richness, or cultural flow are, of
course, meaningless unless they incorporate a thoroughgoing consideration and
appreciation of the visual. Thankfully, cultural criminologists have had a long-
standing interest in both symbolic interaction and the way meaning and power are
negotiated and displayed through the efflorescences of mass-produced imagery.
Similarly, from a methodological perspective, cultural criminology embraces
visual analysis, with readings and counter readings of images and imaginative
media/textual case studies and deconstructions featuring from the outset (see
Ferrell, 1999: 4068 and the international journal Crime, Media, Culture). How
could it really be any other way? In our contemporary world of media festival and
digital spectacle, the story of crime and crime control is now promulgated as
much through the image as through the word. Hence, cultural criminologists use
the visual evidence of crime as a critical and pedagogic vehicle to illuminate the
power of images in shaping popular understandings and social constructions of
crime, deviance, and punishment.
From cell phone photographs and video footage shot in the combat zones of
Iraq and Afghanistan and then posted online, to the grainy CCTV footage that
drives the slurry of primetime cops and robbers compilation shows (Fishman AQ: In Reference ,
and Cavender, 1998; Rappaport, 2007), from unreal reality TV moments that the name is
shape moral values and social norms, to stylized representations of crime and spelled as
Rapaport.
power in comic books (Nyberg, 1998; Williams, 1998) and even criminology
textbook covers (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008: 1012), ours is a world in
which the street scripts the screen and the screen scripts the street; [where] there
is no clearly linear sequence, but rather a shifting interplay between the real and
the virtual, the factual and the fictional. Late modern society is saturated with

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 Opening the lens 5

collective meaning and suffused with symbolic uncertainty as media messages

and cultural traces swirl, circulate and vacillate (ibid: 123).
Needless to say, such concerns are seen by some as a frippery, a marginal
concern well beyond the scope and remit of mainstream (state-sanctioned)
criminology. Nevertheless, as cultural criminologists have said many times
before, dismissing this focus on visual imagery as a decorative or aesthetic
criminology is to mistake method for meaning. In a world where power is
increasingly exercised through mediated representation and symbolic production,
battles over image, style, and cultural representation emerge as essential moments
in the contested negotiation of late modern reality.
However, if cultural criminology is keen to break free of the constraints of
orthodox criminology, it is equally keen to escape the limitations associated with
the existing scholarship on crime and the media. To my mind, this relatively
formulaic body of work (be it the objective quantitative study of media forms
associated with content analysis; the decades old media effects literature that
attempts to unearth tangible causal linkages between media representations and
subsequent audience behaviour; or the tradition of cultivation analysis which
seeks to explain how an excessive fear of crime is produced by a surfeit of
anxiety-inducing violent crime stories) is in desperate need of creative reinter-
pretation and reinvention. The goal must be to move beyond this static received
body of knowledge and strive instead to understand and identify the various ways
in which mediated processes of visual production and cultural exchange now
constitute the experience of crime, self, and society under conditions of late
modernity. This is now an essential task for criminology. For while, traditionally,
criminology has typically denied the visual the sustained attention it deserves,2
elsewhere in the ever mutating world of the Mediascape others working both
within and against the criminal justice sphere are only too aware of the power of
the image and how it can be used both as a tool of control and resistance.
Consider, if you will, the extent to which contemporary Western police forces
(along with the ever-expanding battalions of security and parapolicing agencies)
now utilize camera technology and image monitoring in their everyday practice.
Whether its identifying known offenders via algorithmic surveillance systems;
using dashboard-mounted cameras in police squad cars; the use of video record-
ing in custody suites and during police interrogation; the photographing and
videotaping of crowds and individuals at political demonstrations and protest
marches; acting as consultants on the installation and operation of public and

2 Of course, criminology is not the only social science guilty of this charge. With few exceptions,
sociology has also long ignored the visual as a primary source of data, prioritizing instead the two
pillars of social scientific research, text and statistic. Thankfully, recent years have seen the flour- AQ: Banks, 2005
ishing of a fully fledged visual sociology (see Harper, 1998; Papedemas, 2002; Banks, 2005; is not listed in
Stanczak, 2007; and especially the journal Visual Studies). One noteworthy exception within Reference.
criminology is the expansive three volume set Images of Crime (2001, 2004, 2009), edited by
Telemach Serassis, Harald Kania, and Hans-Jrg Albrecht.

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 6 Keith Hayward

privately funded urban CCTV systems; the deployment of mobile and static car
license-plate recognition cameras; the use of TV shows like C.O.P.S and L.A.P.D:
Life on the Street by certain police forces as both recruiting tools and informa-
tional devices to keep up with developments in other police departments;3 and
now even the deployment of miniaturized uniform and helmet-mounted personal
video cameras by beat officers, its clear that police work is now very much
visual work. Indeed, one might even venture that we are fast approaching the
point where prospective police officers might be better off enrolling on a media
studies course than a criminal justice degree!
But the power of the image be it a crime scene photograph, a slice of low-res
CCTV footage from a surveillance film, or a car chase shot from a police heli-
copter cam is not something that the State and its agents can ever fully own or
control. Far from it the force of the image, the power, and spectacle of the
visual is simply too multidimensional. Images permeate the flow of cultural
meaning in any number of ways, and just as they can be used to serve the State,
they can also be used to critique and undermine it. One of the tasks of cultural
criminology, then, is to insinuate itself into this flow. We must begin to use
images and visual culture for our own ends, to make hard turns toward uncer-
tainty and surprise amidst the saturating spiral of mass culture. For example, just
as one interest group seeks to control or possess an image for its own purposes,
another group can steal it right back and subject it a cultural hijacking and a
radical reversal of meaning.
Anyone who has attended a protest march, a political demonstration, or even
a football match in the UK over the last few years will no doubt be familiar with
the sight of police officers photographing and filming the scene for surveillance
and crowd control purposes. Now while, for some, such practices are just further
evidence of an all-consuming Big Brother state, for others, its the trigger for
organization and resistance; a way of practically invoking Jean Baudrillards
(2005) portentous statement that those who live by the spectacle will die by
the spectacle (see also Retort, 2004).
Heading out for Sushi on Second Avenue during the summer of 2004, New
Yorker Alexander Dunlop inadvertently stumbled upon a demonstration against

3 And then, of course, theres the troubling (and largely unremarked upon) relationship that exists
between police forces and TV executives involved in the production of reality policing shows a
strand of programming that has become so popular it now constitutes its own genre: the so-called
criminal vrit format (one example, the real life police show, C.O.P.S., has spawned over 600
episodes, and grossed in excess of $200 million in the process). While many of these shows such
as Worlds Wildest Police Videos and Police, Camera, Action, are little more than tawdry compila-
tions of sensationalist car chases or traffic stops gone bad, theres also the phenomenon of the
police ride along show, where a TV crew follows and films officers involved in every aspect of
police work, from traffic cop, to dog handler, to helicopter squad. Whats interesting about these
shows is the way they are used by the police forces themselves both as a visual recruiting sergeant
and as a form of image management 30 minute media-friendly police promo videos.

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 Opening the lens 7

the Republican Partys National Convention. Realising his mistake, Dunlop tried
to extricate himself from the area but found his path blocked by riot police setting
up a perimeter around the area; a process that, in a bizarre physical manifestation
of Stan Cohens (1985) famous criminological dictum widening the net and thin-
ning the mesh, involved the deployment of an eight-foot-high plastic mesh fence
and the subsequent arrest of anyone found on the wrong side of the temporary
barricade (Clancy, 2007). Within minutes, Dunlop was arrested, handcuffed,
manhandled onto a bus and transferred to a temporary holding facility at Pier 57.
Held overnight, he was eventually charged with disorderly conduct, resisting
arrest, parading without a permit, and obstructing government administration.
When Dunlops attorney, Michael Conroy, challenged the arrest, he was provided
with an official police video tape of the demonstration showing his clients arrest
and subsequent processing. However, as an evidential record, the tape was seri-
ously flawed. It contained a number of jump cuts that omitted Dunlop asking for
police advice about how to exit the demonstration and also the key moment when
he ultimately, very calmly, resigned himself to the spurious arrest. In short, the
tape had been selectively edited. Enter Eileen Clancy, one of the leading figures
of I-Witness video, an activist group who specialize in videotaping events that
have the potential to spark civil liberties infringements. Expecting trouble,
I-Witness video had been organising workshops and training up teams of videog-
raphers to shoot footage that could be used as part of a legal defence against mass
arrests. This resulted in a treasure trove of hundreds of tapes, including one that
contained the vital missing moments in the Dunlop arrest. Conroy subsequently
used the footage to successfully defend his client, but it did not stop there. As a
result of the coordinated efforts of I-Witness video, the National Lawyers Guild
and others, the vast majority of the cases brought against those arrested at the
convention protest were subsequently dismissed.
A year or so later, a separate but not totally unrelated incident occurred that
illustrates how the power of the image is being further democratized as a result
of the panoptic gaze of digital citizenry. It is 28 July 2008 and Times Square is
deluged by hundreds of bicyclists as the activist group Critical Mass holds one of
its monthly rides. During the ride, committed urban cyclist Christopher Long, 29,
is involved in a collision with Rookie NYPD (New York City Police Department) AQ: Expansion
officer Patrick Pogan. Tension has been running high between the NYPD and OK?
Critical Mass since 2004, when 250 riders were arrested for parading without a
permit during a protest rally against the aforementioned Republican National
Convention. Perhaps no surprise, then, that Long was arrested on charges of
Attempted Assault in the Third Degree, Resisting Arrest and Disorderly
Conduct. However, within days of the incident, a video of the collision (shot by
a tourist) surfaced. It revealed that, far from being Longs fault, the collision
had been caused deliberately by Officer Pogan who violently body slammed
Long off his bike and onto the pavement (Eligon and Moynihan, 2008). Within
days, the story was taken up and publicized by video activists such as the Glass
Bead Collective, the TIMES UP Video Collective, and I-Witness Video, all

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 8 Keith Hayward

AQ: Please provide

figure caption.

groups who know more than a thing or two about using the images in defence of
civil liberties. This small collision became big news (at the time of writing over
1.6 million people had viewed the YouTube footage of the incident) and ulti-
mately big trouble for Officer Pogan. In an incredible volte-face by the NYPD,
Pogan was first suspended and later indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for falsi-
fying a police report and assault. In the words of I-Witnesss Eileen Clancy, This
indictment is a signal event for video activists. Despite the abundance of video
showing that police officers have fabricated charges against people arrested at
demonstrations, in New York City at least, we have never before achieved an
indictment of a police officer for lying in a sworn statement (Clancy, 2008).
Like these video bloggers and activists, cultural criminologists must also work
to become the media and use the power of the image as a tool for understanding
and monitoring issues surrounding crime and criminal justice (see Hoffman and
Brown, this volume).4 That said, the focus of this book is not on video activism
per se (see Gregory et al., 2001 and Harding, 2001 for useful introductions to this

4 At this point, one is compelled to mention the work of Hughes Leglise-Bataille, the photographer
who shot our cover image. A specialist in protest and riot photography, Hughes work consistently
transcends the division between art and politics.

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 Opening the lens 9

field; and relatedly David, 2007).5 Instead, as stated earlier, the goal of this
collection is to make a case for the importance of the image within criminology
more generally. It is my belief that, given the ascendant position of the image/
visual in contemporary culture, it is increasingly important that all criminologists
are familiar with the various ways in which crime and the story of crime is
imaged, constructed, and framed within modern society. This collection there-
fore offers criminologists, be they academics or students, policy makers or theo-
reticians, a more general overview of this relational dynamic, as theorized through
the critical paradigm known as cultural criminology.
However, it is not enough simply to theorize or interrogate the visual. Whilst
this collection will certainly help the reader unearth the hidden social and ideo-
logical concerns that frequently underpin images of crime, violence, and trans-
gression, it has another aim: to point the way forward for those keen to embark
on their own cultural criminological visual analyses. Given that many academic
criminologists and the vast majority of criminology students have little if any
experience of media studies, let alone visual cultural analysis, this book will out-
line and articulate some of the methodological strengths and conundrums associ-
ated with research into the looping and spiralling processes of the crime-media
nexus (see Manning, 1998; Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008: 12937). To this
end, each chapter has a short Methodological Reflections section offering some
thoughts and advice for those wishing to conduct their own visually focused
criminology project.
Therefore, to the various chapters that comprise this collection. However,
before introducing the individual essays, a brief word about what you will not
find in this book. As with any text, there is only so much that can be addressed
in any meaningful detail and thus inevitably certain related areas of interest are
not covered. You will not, for example, find any sustained attention paid to
subjects such as the psychological and behavioural responses surrounding
the relationship between image and beholder, or film-theoretical issues such as
cinematographic technique, the psychoanalytic interpretation of semiotics, 6 inter-
pellation, or narrative desire etc. The mandate of this book likewise does not
extend to include aesthetics, art history, or the changing relationships between
images and people over history. Neither does it attempt to resolve the theoretical
imbroglio surrounding the media effects debate, or the ongoing dispute within
cultural studies about the distinction between so called high and low culture(s).
Similarly, we make no claims to summarize the voluminous body of research
produced by the many disparate fields that constitute visual media studies.

5 See also Alfonso et al. (2004) and Pink (2006) for introductions to the field of video ethnography,
a social research method that aims to capture the detail and nuance of social interactions in context
more intensely than audio or written description (Rhodes and Fitzgerald, 2006: 351).
6 For a thoughtful primer on how to understand and employ semiotics in (visual) criminological
research, see Mariana Valverdes Law and Order: Images, Meanings and Myths (2006, Chs 2 and 3).

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 10 Keith Hayward

Nor do we attempt to condense the criminology-specific empirical research on

the media representation of crime (see Ericson, 1995; Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne,
1995; Reiner, 2002; Carter and Weaver, 2003; Jewkes, 2004; Boyle, 2005; Trend,
2007; and Carrabine, 2008 for eloquent and comprehensive summaries). Instead,
we have stuck to our stated aim of understanding the theoretical and methodo-
logical nuances involved in the relationship between cultural criminology and the
image/the visual. To this end, we have gathered together an impressive roster of
academics well known in Australia, Continental Europe, North America, and the
United Kingdom for their insightful works on cultural criminology. However,
Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image is not just another collec-
tion of sexy essays wherein each author is afforded free range to indulge their
own gaze. Rather, we have sought a degree of consistency; the goal being the
creation of a cohesive collection of topics that, when taken together, break new
ground for cultural criminology without ever becoming esoteric or abstract. Yet
a word of caution: these twelve essays are not meant to be the definitive state-
ment on cultural criminology and the visual far from it. Instead, they should be
seen as more suggestive than diagrammatic; a series of metaphors rather than an
accumulation of static models. Otherwise, in the very attempt to engage with the
fluidity of contemporary culture, we risk reifying our own understandings, risk
forgetting that these understandings are at best useful ephemera in the emergent
construction of collective meaning.
The collection opens with two chapters on the photograph/photography.
Constructing a picture of the photographic spectacle and its practices in the
arena of crime and punishment, Phil Carneys opening essay takes us on a
historical journey from the invention of photography in 1839, through to our
contemporary mediated world of late-modern digital entertainments. In a rich
account of how colonial anthropologists, criminal positivists, and others sought
to use the photograph as an aid to the scientific science of identification, the rise
of newspaper photography, and the emergence of paparazzi, Carney asserts that
what is omnipresent in this history is the way the photograph has functioned as a
social practice of production. In this case, the production of a modern spectacle
that turns around theatres of crime and punishment constituted from the perfor-
mative force of the photograph and its associated festive dynamics of desire and
power. Staying with the modern image par excellence the photograph but
changing the focal lens, Jeff Ferrell and Ccile Van de Voordes chapter explores
the photodocumentary tradition. Reviewing the work of celebrated photographers
such as W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, the chapter
shows how in the hands of a skilled practitioner, the photograph becomes an
archetype that captures and condenses visual knowledge. However, this is no
didactic history. In a comprehensive methods section, Ferrell and Van de Voorde
offer advice on how cultural criminologists might undertake their own photo-
documentaries; to click the camera shutter on their own decisive moment,
whether that moment is found at the soup kitchen, the political demonstration, the
street corner, or on the steps of the criminal courts.

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 Opening the lens 11

Continuing the analysis of how photographs are used to frame social and
personal life in specific ways and from particular angles, Phil Jones and Claire
Wardles chapter highlights how photographic representations of criminals
(when juxtaposed with text, headlines, and accompanying captions) are manipu-
lated by tabloid newspapers to shape popular opinion about crime, justice, and
wrong doing. Focusing on the pictorial press coverage of three centre-right
British newspapers of the high profile Soham Murder Trial, Jones and Wardle
unearth disturbing evidence of how newspaper-formatting techniques encourage
readers to draw entirely misleading conclusions about the case and its prosecu-
tion. Given the influence of the tabloid press, it is perhaps strange that media
scholars have tended to overlook the powerful role of page layout and image
montages in the news making spectacle. This chapter provides a much-needed
corrective.
A second batch of three chapters, in the words of Majid Yar, takes cultural
criminology to the movies. Yar sets the scene by arguing that a thoroughgoing
understanding of the cinematic construction of crime (in all its manifold dimen-
sions) must play a central role in the project of cultural criminology. His essay
starts by reviewing the established social science approaches to film study (con-
tent analysis, the Marxist tradition of film analysis, and, finally, an overview of
the postmodern approach to reading film), before suggesting that the best way
forward for cultural criminology is to transcend these models and develop instead
a new synthetic critical framework for crime film analysis. In a sweeping
critique of Hollywood crime movies that encompasses such diverse offerings as
Bad Lieutenant and Catch Me If You Can, Yar maps out a distinctive, alternative
approach to reading crime film that captures the richness and diversity of film
texts, whilst simultaneously discerning the ways in which they play a role in the
wider politics of law, order, and punishment. Staying with Hollywood film, but
changing tack, Alison Youngs chapter turns more around the relationship
between the spectator and the image. Drawing on the tradition of criminological
aesthetics (see Young, 2004), Professor Young aims to discover how law, vio-
lence and justice appear and re-appear in the image on screen, in order to open up
and give access to the affective dimension of crime and its structures of identifica-
tion. For Young, the emotions that haunt the public imagination are interlaced
with media dynamics something she calls the affective processes associated
with crime representation. Her chapter therefore urges, or perhaps more accu-
rately, challenges cultural criminologists to follow her lead and make the affec-
tive dimension the starting-point for future interrogations of the cinematic
imagination of justice and injustice. In the final chapter on film, Alexandra
Campbell uses the Hollywood movie The Siege as a case study to illustrate how
political and nationalistic ideologies circulate in the cultural script. For
Campbell, the meanings contrived through films such as Edward Zwicks 1998
terrorist cell thriller, The Siege, do not remain confined to the world of fiction.
Instead, they provide a lens or framework for interpreting events and identities,
insidiously compelling us to understand the world in particularized ways.

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 12 Keith Hayward

Campbell asserts that The Siege is a classic expression of an age old orientalist
Hollywood gaze that stereotypes Muslims as a dangerous Other or enemy.
Drawing on semiotic and textual analysis to deconstruct the film, Campbells
thoughtful chapter illustrates how such images and narratives of the Muslim-
Other ultimately serve to reaffirm misguided understandings of terrorism and
counter terrorist measures within the public imagination.
Moving from Hollywood film to images of crime and law in artwork, Chris
Cunneens chapter argues that cultural criminology opens a new space for under-
standing crime where the image is produced by those who are victims of crime
and, at the same time, without access to other channels of communication within
mainstream social and political institutions. Using a fascinating series of
Australian Aboriginal artworks as his research data, Cunneen shows how one can
use these images to both critique the unthinking imposition of colonial law on the
Aboriginal way of life, and, importantly, as a powerful medium for expressing
the oft neglected nuances and subtleties of Aboriginal law and culture. Stephen
Muzzati also embarks on a nuanced reading of cultural artefacts, only this time
his chosen subject matter takes an all the more ubiquitous and corrosive form.
While advertisements envelop our every turn, occupying the pages of newspapers
and magazines, saturating our television programming and web surfing, and
increasingly transforming public spaces into corporate billboards, they have been
subject to surprisingly little criminological analysis. Some, of course, will assert
that there is good reason for this: what, after all, have commercials got to do
with criminology? Cultural criminologists take issue with such a position, and
Muzzatis engaging essay contributes to a growing tranche of cultural crimino-
logical research that explores and critiques the increasing use of transgressive
visual imagery in contemporary advertising (see e.g. Presdee, 2000; Hayward,
2004). Focusing specifically on automobile commercials, Muzzati shows how, in
a desperate bid to boost the flagging sales of increasingly redundant Sports Utility
Vehicles and fuel-inefficient luxury cars, late-modern advertisers now regularly
base their advertising and marketing campaigns on romanticized tropes of trans-
gression and crime, allied with visual motifs of conspicuous disobedience.
Bruce Hoffman and Michelle Browns chapter turns our attention away from
figurative and imagined representations of crime and resistance and directs us
back to an earlier theme of photo (or more accurately visual) documentary.
Employing the new technologies of digital filmmaking Hoffman and Brown
show us that, as a consequence of the digital revolution, it is now possible
indeed wholly advisable for cultural criminologists to think about producing
their own short or feature length newsmaking documentaries. Drawing on their
own experiences of videoing the media circus that engulfed the execution of
Oklahoma Bomber Timothy McVeigh in 2001, Professors Brown and Hoffman
offer reflections and advice about how documentary filmmaking can function to
challenge and destabilize the dominant frames of meaning that underpin the
mainstream broadcast media.

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 Opening the lens 13

No collection concerned with how crime is imaged would be complete without

a chapter on the representation of transgression and deviance on the internet
surely now societys most fecund seedbed for the spread of violent imagery.
Damian Zaitch and Tom de Leeuw analyse the construction, performance,
and recreation of identity by football hooligan groups (specifically Dutch;
Casuals; or hard-core football supporters and Argentinean Barras Bravas) on
the internet. Closely dissecting photos, photomontages, video posts, and other
forms of bricolaged online iconography, Dutch criminologists Zaitch and
de Leeuw take us inside the sub rosa world of subcultural football violence;
highlighting a number of critical issues about the cultural performance of football
supporters rarely addressed either by mainstream hooligan research, or by internet
violence studies.
Bringing the collection to a close, the criminologist and legal scholar, Wayne
Morrison, continues his campaign to develop a more global criminology capable
of encompassing topics traditionally excluded from the canon, such as the crimes
of war and genocide. Here, he focuses on four harrowing images of human suf-
fering that span the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth century,
nineteenth-century colonial exploitation of central Africa, and the low point of
twentieth-century genocidal history, the Nazi Holocaust. Morrisons goal is
twofold: to illustrate the complex processes by which such atrocity images are
produced, collected and edited; and to offer a series of challenging reflections
about the role of the visual within criminology. Traversing both historical epoch
and the disciplinary divisions that exist between criminology and juridical-legal
analysis, Morrisons essay adroitly illuminates the power of the image, but it also
raises unsettling philosophical questions about the nature of the relationship
between the spectator and the image of atrocity.
It is established academic convention for opening chapters of edited collections
to introduce and summarize the essays that follow. However, it is less common
to reflect on how the reader might see the volume as a conceptual whole. When
taking in a landscape, billboard, or photograph, one approaches the image from
different angles, focuses on different aspects, sees within it different things. It is
hoped that the same is true of the eclectic mix of critical articles, case studies, and
visual deconstructions that have been gathered together here. As mentioned in the
foregoing section, cultural criminologys goal is to keep turning the kaleido-
scope on the way we think about crime, and this is never truer than when we try
to make sense of the ever mutating world of the late modern Mediascape. If we
are to broaden and enliven criminological teaching and research in the area of
visual culture, we cannot afford to regress to simplistic, monolithic methods. It is
no longer sufficient just to count or codify images, or even to strive to unearth
spurious causal linkages between media representations and subsequent human
behaviour. Instead, we must approach our subject matter as a person studies an
album of photographs or as a visitor approaches a painting in a gallery from
various angles and from diverse perspectives. If images are creatively constructed,

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 14 Keith Hayward

then we must study not just the image itself, but also the process of construction
and the subsequent processes of production, framing, and interpretation. In other
words, cultural criminologys relationship with the image/the visual must be a
creative one that recognizes images as carefully crafted moments (see relatedly,
Nisbet, 1976).
Perhaps, then, it is fitting that this introduction concludes on an artistic note.
The Canadian art photographer and academic Jeff Wall is frequently described
by critics as a storyteller. He describes himself as a painter of modern life.
Since 1977 he has used backlit transparencies and large-format black-and-white
photographs mounted in light boxes to create a series of extraordinarily intense,
almost cinematographic images that challenge social reality, explore the phenom-
enology of experience, and champion the lives of oppressed groups in American
society.7 In a short essay celebrating the visual force of Walls work, the art his-
torian Jean-Christophe Ammann makes the following important observation:
documentaries, he asserts, have shown us the difference between a picture and a
document: a picture is always likewise a document, but a document is certainly
not always a picture. Jeff Wall operates with both types, transforming pictures
into documents and documents into pictures. He achieves this dialectic tour
de force which links history, narration, art history, and everyday life to the
present with a masterful feel for the picture (Ammann, 2001: 11). If cultural
criminology is to move forward in the study and interpretation of images of crime
and transgression, and if it is to develop new theoretical expressions of discovery
and documentation, it too must strive to achieve a masterful feel for the
picture a mastery that is at once both creative and critical.
In another time, Erving Goffman (1974) famously wrote that frames both
organize the past and help shape and determine how new experiences are felt and
interpreted. The hope for Framing Crime is that it will also help shape and inter-
pret cultural criminologys future experiences, as it strives to make sense of a
world in which the image is truly ascendant.

7 Wall also knows something about the immediacy of crime, having had a gun pulled on him by
a disgruntled student during a brief stint as a professor of photography at the Dsseldorf Academy
in 1996.

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