Symposium on Visual Rhetoric

Securing the Image: Surveillance, Verification, and Global Violence

Northwestern University

Annie May Swift Hall

November 1, 2014

Somewhere between the worldwide adoption of digital imaging technologies and the Global War on Terror, photographic documentation became both highly suspect and increasingly important. Questions regarding surveillance, manipulation, and other factors in image production have become occasions for inquiry into some of the most basic assumptions about visual media and public culture. These questions acquire additional significance when visual practices are intertwined with violence done in the name of national security. At the same time, they offer new vantages for rethinking the nature of the image and its aesthetic and political possibilities. The symposium on Securing the Image includes two public lectures devoted to reconsidering key issues in visual surveillance and verification:

9:00 a.m.  David Campbell, “Manipulation, Scraping, and Verification: Securing the Integrity of Visual Representations of Political Violence”

10:30 a.m.  Rachel Hall, “Asymmetrical Transparency: The Global Politics of Risk Management”

David Campbell is the A. Lindsay O’Connor Professor in the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Colgate University. He is the author of six books and more than 60 articles, and has produced visual projects on the Bosnian War, imaging famine, and the visual economy of HIV-AIDS. As a research consultant to World Press Photo he directed their 2012-13 Multimedia Research Project and a 2014 project on “The Integrity of the Image.” He is also Secretary to the World Press Photo Contest. David produces multimedia and video projects, and all his work can be seen at www.david-campbell.org.

Rachel Hall is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. Her publications included Wanted: The Outlaw in American Visual Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2009), The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Duke University Press, 2015), and articles in Performance Research, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Communication Review, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies, and Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

Sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication and the Department of Communication Studies/Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture.  For additional information contact symposium organizer Robert Hariman (r-hariman2@northwestern.edu) or administrative assistant Dakota Brown (jdakotabrown@u.northwestern.edu).