Evidence, Truth, and Order Tagg, John. "Evidence,

¶ … Evidence, Truth, and Order Tagg, John. "Evidence, Truth and Order: A Means of Surveillance" From Visual Culture: The Reader. Edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. New York: Sage, 1999, pp. 244-273. Originally published as Tagg, John. "A Means of Surveillance: Photograph as Evidence in Law," in John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Evidence, Truth, and Order. London: Macmillan, 1988, pp. 66-102.

When confronted with an article entitled "Evidence, Truth, and Order: A Means of Surveillance," a reader unacquainted with the rest of the photographer and critics John Tagg's work or the authors' other writings on the subject of his art might assume that his written work to follow the title would center purely upon notions of the criminal justice system pertaining to evidence and the establishment of truth, viewed with the electronic eye of mechanized surveillance.

However, Tagg, a photographer, is mainly concerned with the photographic art specifically of the studio and the museum, not of the justice system, although his theories pertain to issues of the prison house and justice as well as to art. Tagg in his essay is not only concerned with photographic evidence as deployed in the law courts and the ability of those photographs to make truth claims for juries and justices but of the implications of photographic representations in law for artists and photography as well.

In all of his writings and works, John Tagg is concerned with photography's ability to open up a pictorial eye upon the world. Is the photographic eye, asks Tagg, seeing the 'real' world in an unvarnished way, in the language of objective legal evidence or truth? Rather, Tagg would suggest, instead of providing an objective or impartial gaze upon life, photography, supposedly the most objective of the pictorial arts, merely transmits the vision and the limited perspective of the photographer.

What a photographer includes within a frame (and leaves out of the frame) establishes only a subjective truth claim and an artificial order upon the limitless protoplasmic formless quality of life. The surveillance of photography may indeed by the watching of a voyeur. But even a voyeur in real life chooses what he or she wishes to spy on. The selection of the voyeur to spy upon intimate or criminal matters says as much about the spy's preoccupations as the subject of the espying eye.

Likewise, the photographer's selection of a subject says as much about the photographer as it does about whom is being spied upon. The danger of photography, though, says Tagg, is that the impression that the medium of the art of photography conveys is that the medium creates the impression that it merely is giving a 'real' glimpse of life in an unvarnished and objective manner. This is particularly dangerous when a picture is taken as evidence that a crime was committed, regardless of the subjective nature of even forensic photography.

Even if the photographer does not intend to establish a truth-claim that what the photographic eye captures is 'the real,' our cultural perceptions of photography leads us to see what is submitted as photographic evidence in the court of law or in the museum as art as real.

The additional truthfulness assumed by the mouthpieces of the state in the form of the prosecutor, combined with the forensic weight of photographic evidence can make it difficult for a defendant to establish his or her guilt or innocence against such a weighty visual claim. In one of Tagg's earlier essays about the unique burden of the photographer, the author stated that there is no true objectivity of the photographer with the anticipated objectiveness of a machine.

Rather a photographer is only a human being and is always operating the photographic eye, rather than the photographic eye merely existing as separate and apart from the operating subject. The eye on the other side of the camera is as much an 'I' or a subject as the individual whom is rendered in the form of the photograph. (Tagg, 1988) Thus, the photographer is only a sensible human being.

The nature of photography is at its essence just as mysterious as that of a painter's inspiration in terms of personal selection of subject and moment. (Tagg 1988, p.111) The photograph's reality may be taken for granted, taken as objective truth. But it is anything but -- a photograph is a selection of an intensely subjective nature. It creates evidence not of happenstance or arbitrary gaze, but a focused and artistic choice. Even if the photograph takes pictures somewhat at random,.