Several of my past blog posts have looked at the nature of digital images and just how they differ from traditional photographs.  I’d say it’s pretty clear that a digital image is not simply an updated version of an analogue photograph but a completely different animal.  Current events put me in mind of a legal case I looked at quite thoroughly a little while ago which demonstrates this difference.  It’s the case of Rodney King.

First I’ll ask you to watch this sequence and I have to warn you that it is very unpleasant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HOalToMtg .  If you prefer not to watch it then this still will give you an idea of what it is about. 

Next: I want you to ask yourself exactly what it is that you have just seen on the video – or what you see in the still.  Just say it to yourself or write it down in simple English before you carry on reading what follows below.

Here is the background.

In 1992 a man named George Holliday used his video camera to record an incident in which several white Los Angeles police officers surrounded and repeatedly struck and stamped on black motorist Rodney King.   Holliday offered the video to the police as a record of the incident but they showed no interest and so he took it to a television station.  When the images were broadcast there was widespread sympathy for Mr. King and condemnation of what on the face of it was a brutal and unjustified beating.  The police officers were prosecuted for use of excessive force and when the case came to court the prosecution attorney invited the jury to “Just watch the videotape”.   He proposed the sequence shown by the video to be unchallengeable. “You have the videotape. Watch it, ladies and gentlemen. What more do we need?” 

The jury did indeed watch the tape of the police officers beating and stamping on King – just as you have done.  You may think you saw a vicious assault, but the jury didn’t: they acquitted the defendants. 

How did that come about?

The defence strategy was to digitalise the (analogue) videotape and then to use the new technology to choreograph an entirely different event through techniques such as slowed projection, freeze framing, blow-ups, digitised mark-ups and frame grabs. This broke up the ostensible narrative and constructed an entirely different one.  They argued that the police were trained to subdue those resisting arrest by instructing them to lie down.  It was only when Mr. King rose up from the ground in defiance of their instructions that they were obliged to use their batons. When he lay down the officers’ batons rose away from him, they said. He wasn’t being knocked down at all.

So the prosecution’s innocent black man being beaten by racist police metamorphosed in the defence’s digital account into a violent offender being lawfully subdued.  By disrupting the sequence of the images digitally the defence suggested a complete reversal of causation.  Through the use of still images drawn from the sequence, and by slowing down the tape, the defence were able to make the blows look slower and more restrained and to mute effectively a readily intelligible soundtrack. 

While it might not have been impossible for the defence to mount a similar case using analogue images it would have been nowhere near as persuasive because their strategy of disrupting the narrative flow of the video would have been much more difficult technically.  The officers were acquitted, the prosecution paid the price for a simplistic approach rooted in the analogue tradition and, many would say, justice was not done. In the resulting riots 53 people were killed, some 2500 were injured and around 1500 buildings were destroyed or damaged.

To my knowledge this was the first legal case in which digital imagery was used as evidence. It shows how digital technologies – and especially images - construct truth.  They are fast; they are slick; they get everywhere in a flash; they are easily arranged into sequences; you can stitch them together with other data forms in a trice; and they are untraceable - here today and gone tomorrow.  They have a rhetorical potential unmatched in the modern world.

I think that’s really why I myself went back to the traditional methods: the reassuring physicality of film, canisters, winding mechanisms, negatives, chemicals and darkrooms. Digital is a convenient truth but, as the above case shows, not a very reliable one.