Framing the Accused: The Perp Walk as Media Ritual

Abstract

This qualitative project examines an American photojournalism ritual known as the “perp walk,” defined as the nonconsensual imaging of a person who is either in custody or otherwise legally obligated to attend a legal proceeding. The project draws from interviews, participant observation, and visual textual analysis to analyze perp walks within a constructivist paradigm. Framing theory and gatekeeping also inform the analysis, characterizing perp walks as cultural sites for both material and discursive struggle. The study found that the discursive framing of their portrayals seems most painful to the subjects of perp walks and that the materiality of image access causes photojournalists to ignore everyday competition and work as a team to complete perp-walk assignments.

Notes

Notes

¹ This is a small number of people in part because they are such a special class; both subjected to perp walks and not guilty. I have submitted an application to my Institutional Review Board for permission to interview other subjects: those who've been subjected to perp-walk photography, found guilty, and incarcerated.

² During an observation for a separate research project, a former photography department head joked that reporter–photographer collaboration is overrated and usually consists of a conversation about what to have for lunch and then complaining about the assignment editor.

³ Typically photographers get information that's been passed through more than one person in the newsroom and suffer from the “down the lane” syndrome—by the time the information reaches them, it's watered down and sparse.

⁴ It's the east door, closest to the parking garage.

⁵ It is generally against court rules for defendants to be seen in cuffs in front of jurors. Barnett's (2003) study found that such images of people in handcuffs inspire higher assessments of guilt.

⁶ This is somewhat unusual in that she was not charged with the crime, but the notorious nature of this case likely inspired a “shoot whatever moves” policy for the visual media.

⁷ He has since sent a copy to me, but I won't print it here in order to protect his anonymity.

⁸ For a discussion of ethnographic interpretation of interview data, see Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983.

⁹ Though he had to wait several days for the top DA returned from vacation to hold the news conference.

¹⁰ Another veteran shooter has remarked to me, outside of this research project, that “these are not good days for anyone.”

¹¹ The Lindbergh Baby Case, in which Bruno Hauptman was tried with a courtroom full of reporters and photographers, is most often cited as the reason for the ban on cameras in the courts, even though subsequent scholarship has found that the trial may not have been nearly as much of a madhouse as purported.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Angela Bock

Mary Angela Bock is a member of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former television journalist-turned-academic with an interest in the sociology of photography practice, the relationship between words and images and digital media. She is the author of Visual Journalism: Beyond the One Man Band (Lang, 2012) and the co-author, with Shahira Fahmy and Wayne Wanta, of Visual Communication Theory and Research: A Mass Communication Perspective (2015, Palgrave). She earned her PhD from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. E-mail: [email protected].