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Palmer, Alice --- "Image and art in the Whaling in the Antarctic case" [2020] ELECD 114; in McCutcheon, Jani; McGaughey, Fiona (eds), "Research Handbook on Art and Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) 408

Book Title: Research Handbook on Art and Law

Editor(s): McCutcheon, Jani; McGaughey, Fiona

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 25

Section Title: Image and art in the Whaling in the Antarctic case

Author(s): Palmer, Alice

Number of pages: 19

Abstract/Description:

The parties to the Whaling in the Antarctic case included photographs in their submissions to the International Court of Justice without mention of their purpose. Australia presented photographs of bloody harpooned whales while Japan submitted images of sanitised whale tissue in laboratory settings. The photographs might have been employed as evidence or rhetoric but their significance to the case is unclear. This chapter maintains that a distinction made in aesthetic theory between photographs as records and as representations explains different functions for the images in the proceedings. It undertakes an aesthetic analysis of the photographs as representations, with reference to visual art reflecting social and cultural attitudes towards whales in Australia and Japan, to narrate rhetorical claims. An aesthetic understanding of photographs in international legal proceedings serves to recognise the work of the photographs beyond evidence and to articulate the representations made through graphic images for legal analysis and judicial determination.