This paper focuses on the documentary photography of Eugène Atget in late 19th and early 20th-century Paris. I will begin by exploring Atget’s position as a pioneering documentary photographer in the field, followed by an engagement with the urban environment of Paris, in which Atget worked almost exclusively. Finally, I will analyse a single photograph in depth while discussing it in relation to the work of Charles Baudelaire and Jacques Rancière. This text is a contribution to a literature of critical (...) engagement with documentary photography, urban history and the politics of class visibility. I will do so by arguing for the political significance of reading Atget’s images in a critical, political manner that engages with Rancière’s concept of the ‘anonymous multiple’. Atget is considered a key documentary photographer, and, as such, he is exemplary of the history of documentary photography and its treatment of its subjects. (shrink)

Rafe McGregor's Narrative Justice provides a powerful argument for the merit of an education by and through aesthetics as a way of challenging criminal inhumanity. As a work at the intersection of critical criminology and philosophy, it is a challenging and thoughtful articulation of the criminological imagination.1 Ultimately, McGregor's argument highlights the possibility of a political education through aesthetic engagement. The exemplary narratives that McGregor uses are varied and richly evocative. My commentary on the book is in keeping with this (...) spirit and suggests an exemplary narrative of my own as a way of both complementing McGregor's book and outlining its merits, as well as proposing a future line of... (shrink)