ABSTRACT
As criminologists Jeff Ferrell and Cécile Van de Voorde (2010: 40) have said, “the photodocumentary tradition embodies a tension that has long bedevilled criminology and other “social sciences”: that between objective inquiry and subjective analysis.” Documentary photographers, they argue, while employing a device “designed to capture the visual reality of an event”, nevertheless are very much mediators of that reality, “us[ing] their photographic skills to interpret and communicate these events, and so force the viewers … into visual confrontations with horror, violence, injustice and death.” But, as the following discussion will show, those “confrontations” can all too easily be compromised and even negated, both by those very same skills and by the motivation of others to exploit them.
