Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence (Beaux livres)
Images of Conviction is the catalogue of the 2015 exhibition at Le BAL in Paris on how photographs are made into evidence, told through eleven case studies that run from Alphonse Bertillon's metric photography of Paris crime scenes to drone-strike imagery.
Diane Dufour, Le BAL's director, framed the project around how investigators of violent crime build a case in which an image becomes evidence. The 240-page catalogue was co-published by Éditions Xavier Barral and Le BAL, in English and French versions, with 280 black-and-white photographs. Christian Delage, Thomas Keenan, Tomasz Kizny, Luce Lebart, Jennifer L. Mnookin, Anthony Petiteau, Eric Stover and Eyal Weizman contribute texts, with an introduction by Dufour. Xavier Barral worked with the designer Coline Aguettaz on a sober layout that puts the legibility of the images first. The catalogue won Photography Catalogue of the Year at the 2015 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.
Le BAL is a Paris institution for contemporary photography, founded to examine the role of images in society and in our understanding of history. The exhibition ran there from 4 June to 30 August 2015.
