Vernacular Image Forensics: The Documentary Mode and Photographic Revelation

This dissertation tracks a vernacular mode of image forensics across non-fiction media, cinema, and television. While the ability of photographic, video, and filmic images to faithfully represent the profilmic feels eroded in new ways, there is nonetheless a continued reliance on this very ability in everyday life. We depend on these images, but we look at them sideways. From this predicament arises the pervasive presence of image forensics in popular culture, which offers itself as a set of techniques, technologies, and methods to bring resolution to this conceptual precarity and contradiction. The concept of vernacular image forensics brings together the disparate non-fiction genres of paranormal investigation, conspiracy theory, and true crime into one conversation. In these texts we often find a forensic treatment of, and disposition towards, the photographic image. In our so-called “post-truth” age, we seem paradoxically fixated on the material reality within the frame, as if we can literally reach out and touch it. As the evidentiary value of photographs, films, and videos is increasingly seen as inseparable from their value as data, our everyday production and reception of them comes to resemble the meticulous parsing work of forensic analysis.