![]() ![]() It’s a common misconception that nonfiction imagery and footage presents “the truth.” By appearing onscreen, as well as through other means, the helmer-writer-editor makes the point that any photographic image or movie frame is by definition incomplete. ![]() “There are some things you don’t want to see,” the director comments from behind his camera, the note of paradox understated but unmistakable.Īnthony makes his presence known throughout the film: We see him setting up sequences as well as filming - and, as a white cameraman in a meeting of Black Baltimoreans, he doesn’t go unnoted by community center participants. It’s a point of pride for Axon that its lenses mimic the human eye infrared imagery, Tuttle points out, was a “big mistake” that some competitors made, because a court and jury shouldn’t have information beyond the perspective of the officer wearing the camera. A guided tour of its Scottsdale, Arizona, headquarters and demonstrations of its products by corporate spokesperson Steve Tuttle flaunt the concepts of “transparency” and “candor” and also such cutting-edge widgets as “anti-felon identification confetti.”īut they also reveal clear biases, even as the company, like PSS, emphasizes the neutrality of body-camera footage. More than half the police departments in the United States use body cameras, and Axon claims the lion’s share of body-camera sales. They’re touted to the public as tools for ensuring police accountability, but within the Baltimore PD class filmed by Anthony, the accent is on police exoneration.Īxon, formerly known as Taser International, is a major player in the “less-lethal weapons market,” to drop an Orwellian turn of phrase. In this context, the product that PSS “integrate with local police” becomes a citizen-friendly “unbiased witness to police activity.” We observe a similar repositioning of intent for the body cameras of Axon International. One of the doc’s most charged and searing sequences finds McNutt, seeking clients after the covert program has been exposed and shuttered, pitching his high-in-the-sky surveillance capabilities for “troubled cities” to a community center in a Black neighborhood. At the time of those 2016 flyovers - with a photograph taken every second - Baltimore was a city still reacting to the 2015 murder of Freddie Gray while in police custody. On the director’s home turf of Baltimore, PSS teamed with the police department in a surveillance program so top-secret that even the mayor was unaware of it. In that aerial realm, a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, headed by a soft-spoken man named Ross McNutt, figures large in Anthony’s film. And in the camera-equipped homing pigeons who were enlisted as aerial photographers during World War I, we find proto-drones. The documentary doesn’t explicitly discuss facial recognition, but the implications resonate, urgently. Then there would be systems for cataloging photographic images, like Alphonse Bertillon’s method of identifying criminals and the composite portraits of eugenicist Francis Galton, which attempted to reduce individuals to types and predict criminal behavior. ![]() #All light everywhere portable#(In 2017 South Carolina, we see a far more relaxed crowd gather for a solar eclipse.)Īn invention known as the photographic revolver was inspired in part by the rapid-firing Gatling gun, and the chronophotographic rifle was, in essence, the first portable movie camera. There was intense competition to document the phenomenon, which takes place roughly every two and a half centuries. To interrogate the widely accepted notion that cameras provide impartial evidence, Anthony traces a number of 19th century developments in the use of photography, beginning with the 1874 transit of Venus across the sun and the technological innovations it inspired. ![]()
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