Working with images in daily life and police practice: an assessment of the documentary tradition

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature within the humanities and social sciences that is directly critical of the documentary tradition’s treatment and use of still and moving images as realistic data. The documentary tradition claims that it is possible to visually document social scenes with cameras. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, critical theory and related traditions argue that still and moving images amount to representations, their critique of realism. As instruments, cameras are open to a variety of uses ranging from the scientific to the artistic in orientation. Such uses of cameras comprise representational work. Following Garfinkel, this article suggests that the documentary method of sense making is employed in numerous practical situations.

This article commences with an overview of the documentary tradition and then offers a brief case study of certain of these principles in operation within the practical work of the police and road users on public highways. Public highways and traffic flows along them are visually available social arrangements. Within police work that involves the regulation and management of traffic flows, stored images of vehicles can serve as documentary evidence of traffic violations. In this particular context and more generally on the highways, road users treat objects such as road signs and related items of roadside furniture, including cameras and road markings, as documents of some, for all practical purposes, real states of affairs. Road users make sense of the stream of visual information encountered as an ongoing practical accomplishment.