Insidious Lassitude

I was watching something on TV a week or two ago – it may’ve been Crimewatch, or it was a show a bit like that – where the police were revealing the techniques they’d used to solve a particularly grim rape case. Down at the station the show’s presenter cast his critical eye over several dusty bin liners of vital case evidence, while a tubby detective and his officer tossed bad syntax and malapropism around with milk and two sugars in an effort to sound at once like men of the people and a little bit brilliantly perspicacious too.

Like a Chocolate Digestive-fingered Fagin, the head detective proudly directed his lackey to show the presenter the photo-fit image that they’d circulated and a photograph of the man they subsequently convicted because – they said – of the success of the photo-fit. The officer dutifully scurried to the filing cabinet and emerged with the images. The presenter swooned in what appeared to be genuine amazement. “Look at the eyes; the same eyes!” he cooed, “That’s as-ton-ishing, he has the same look in his eyes!” “Evil!!” he squealed. After much smug vindictive nodding from the grubby detective and his simpering gamin, the presenter made a further contribution to the annals of rigorous journalism by noting both images had mouths and noses. Seriously. He drew his index finger over the facial features as if tracing letters carved into an antique Ouija board: “…e…v…i…l…” he mouthed. You could see his eyes widening as he traced each of the letters; then there was a second or two of perplexed blinking while he engaged the full force of his BBC journalist acuity to turn the letters into a word. Then suddenly, mind besieged by something profound and ineffable, there was a paroxysmal thrust of the photos on to the Formica desk, like he daren’t look at the nefandous face any longer lest he himself be raped right there and then. “Despicable bastard, int he?” spat the detective between sups of tea.

Of course, the photo-fit and the photograph looked nothing alike. Absolutely nothing, save the presence of the aforementioned mouths and noses, and ears and foreheads and the other requisite Homo sapien features. And though there were eyes too, neither of the people depicted in the images looked ‘evil’ (whatever that is).

Photo-fits only ever get made in certain circumstances; they are for people who can’t be photographed, who are unknown, or who can’t be found – in almost all cases it is criminals that they represent. The photo-fit stands as a sort of placeholder for a real identity until such time as the real person is found, or the identity fixed and a photograph is discovered. They also provide a receptacle for an emotional response; a part of the identity is created by the viewer’s feelings toward the subject – the same goes for any photograph. Some facets of identity are relational, not absolute, and are dependent not on the person themselves, but on those who perceive them. The BBC sees evil; I see a man who did a rape. (Which is not to say it wasn’t an extremely severe and awful crime; the man is clearly very troubled, but not evil.) His identity is not inherent: not in real life, not in a photograph, and certainly not in a photo-fit. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, as they (seldom) say. Because they’re only made for those who are absent, the photo-fit comes with a set of implications, narratives, or connotations. In most cases the person depicted is a criminal, in most cases they’re ‘on the run’. They’re a marginal identity, no name, no location; not even any photographs of them.

It is then, unlikely that ol’ jerky-knees from the BBC will perceive the photo-fit sympathetically. It’s an image of identity that virtually comes captioned: ‘Marginal Character. Probably not human. Likely evil. Smells like the man that murdered Jill Dando likely did’. He’ll see exactly what he expects to see. And he won’t construct anything from the physical evidence of the image; unless he’s high on a phrenology-like hokum then it’s doubtful whether much can be gleaned from appearance anyway. He’ll see exactly what he feels about the man. Those eyes aren’t evil; they only look evil because they’re the eyes of a criminal seen through the eyes of someone who constructs things in terms which encompass the notion of evil. If the photo-fit artist had slotted in Ghandi’s eyes, or those of a felicitous lamb, then they would still have looked evil to yer BBC correspondent because he would still be looking at them through the veils of knowledge that this is a criminal and the veil of his own opinions on criminals. Similarly, if I looked at this new photo-fit I’d be no more or less likely to think the lamb-eyed man wasn’t evil. Though I may be moved to muse on the advantages 290 degree lamb-vision may afford a criminal.

*****

After the news and before the shows about buying property, is the BBC’s new daytime ‘Missing Live’ series. It’s a live Crimewatch-like show about missing people; instead of being contractually obliged to be spooked by evil, the presenters remain solemn and painfully reverent throughout.

The other day they featured a story about Katrice Lee. She was abducted from a supermarket on a British army base in Germany when she was two years old. The police initially reckoned she may not’ve been snatched, but may’ve run out of the shop and fallen (”plunged”, the emotionally restrained BBC said) into the river behind (which at the time was a “swollen white-water torrent”) and been swept away (”carried to a freezing death”). The family didn’t think this was likely and, convinced she was kidnapped, 25 years later they still believe her to be alive and continue to campaign to keep the story publicised. Because Lee was only two when she disappeared, her appearance would have changed very quickly. And now, as she approaches 30, she’ll obviously look very different than in the last photograph of her. A couple of years ago there was a lot of publicity surrounding the unveiling of a ‘digital impression’ of how she may look now. On TV last week Lee’s father talked movingly about the relationship he has with this image; how thankful he is for it, how it is all he has of his daughter, how he talks to it and projects narratives on to it, how it is very dear to him and he’s glad of it yet at the same time it only serves as a reminder of what he hasn’t got – how he can’t hold the photo like he imagines holding his daughter, how her identity is only what he makes it, it is a one-way relationship.

Despite all the hoopla about the digital impression and how it’s indicative of the colonisation of some previously unimaginable intergalactic outpost of science, the image looked staggeringly rudimentary and simplistic to me. It looks reasonable enough when it’s plonked – as it habitually is – next to the photo of the two year old Lee, but when it’s viewed alongside her parents then it is revealed to be rather less sophisticated. Far from looking like it’s at the forefront of ‘identity imaging technology’ (whatever that is), it looks like it was cobbled together on a Commodore 64 graphics program while Pac-Man was loading. The methodology seems to have involved cutting out her father’s eyes, her mother’s nose and mouth, and then whacking them onto a photo of her sister’s face. It looks a little like an image constructed for the children’s board game ‘Guess Who’: “Does the person have the same mouth as her mother? Is everyone consanguine to the person represented by a facial feature? Ah hah! Is the person Katrice Lee?!” Nuanced and subtle it isn’t.

It seems a little unfair and insensitive to be flippant about an image in which so much profound love, loss, and grief are invested, but it is perhaps a testament to the desperate strength of those feelings that the family are able to forge such complex and enduring relationships with such a strikingly implausible image. Of course, listening to her father talk it is hard not to imagine the emotional complexities he may experience should Katrice turn up and look nothing like this image he’s been conducting an intense relationship with and foisting narratives upon for the past few years.

Although it is hopelessly simplistic and likely wildly inaccurate, the digital impression does at least look human. What is most striking about photo-fit images is that they invariably look like they were made by a GCSE art student who can’t draw people. It seems this is a deliberate ploy to avoid giving the criminal any recognisable humanity; “he has the features”, the image seems to say, “but they’re odd and peculiar, not like normal folks’. Not like ours”. Lee’s digital impression, on the other hand, has been rendered with enough kindness that journalists have been moved to comment on her ‘caring eyes’ that are wistful and hunted, and her melancholy air. They’re certainly just projecting characteristics onto the image in the light of the accompanying narrative, but it is worth noting that the that the image has been drawn with enough sophistication to accomodate such a generous and postitive reading of Lee’s personality. Still, stick the image above a story of murder -or rape - and the same jounalists would probably draw her character a little less sympathetically. Context is likely the principal visual difference between ‘caring’ and ‘evil’.

Photo-fit image identities don’t look evil, or indeed like bad people, but it notable that they do all have a particular appearance. Cold, paradoxically-indistinct, refusing to engage, lacking any trace of emotion: these are depictions of people shorn of the things which would normally construct identity. They are rendered as a mutation of the human species; the same, but different. What’s left in this identity-vacuum is a space that needs to be rushed by the viewer’s opinion. The vacant look photo-fit identities wear is perhaps a vacancy designed to be easily filled by the emotions stirred by the attendant ‘Marginal character. Probably not human . . .’ caption.

Although Lee’s digital impression was made by a Commodore 64 and not a child who can’t draw, the main difference is in the intended use. Lee’s image is intended to invoke humanity; ‘Marginal character’ photo-fits are intended to invoke inhumanity. They need to be receptacles for different emotions. This is made clear by the way in which photo-fits made for reasons other than hunting down fugitives are drawn in a much more emotionally sophisticated way. Curiously, the student seems only to be unable to draw criminals.