Abstract

There is a consanguinity of surveillance and documentary which is here explored. Forensic experts depend on an assumption that the surveilled image can "speak for itself," but it cannot. I revisit the Halliday video of the Rodney King beating, a Nannycam "shaken baby" scandal, and the arguments about the evidence presented in the ethnographic classic The Ax-Fight to explore why the image always needs a context, a "caption" in Barthesian terms, if it is to be deconstructed. In all these instances, surveillance presents itself as the purest mode of achieving referential integrity in the documentary image - but, as surveillance is not (and cannot be) a guarantee of authenticity, its use exacerbates the ethical problems involved in "catching life unawares." The Bridge, with its repeated distant observation of suicides, is a dramatic example both of the importance of surveillance to documentary and the moral hazards of deploying it.