2 Existing scholarship on the visual image of the judge

Scholarship on the visual representation of judges in film and television crosses the spectrum of factual and fictional representations. However, research on the former (television news, documentary) is rare (Moran, Reference Moran and Sarat2008a). Slotnick and Segal’s Television News and the Supreme Court (Reference Slotnik and Segal1998) is an exception,Footnote ¹⁰ but it is an exception with severe limits. The importance of the visual is recognised (it plays a key role, engaging the audience, widening appeal, generating the emotional dynamics of news, adding a heightened sense of realism), but the authors pay little attention to the form of those visual images, how the visual images are made or how an audience sees or doesn’t see them. Research on the judiciary in visual fiction is a little more promising. Ross Levi’s thematic analysis of American English language ‘legal cinema’ (predominantly courtroom drama), identified a significant number of films (251 titles) with ‘judge’ in the plot-line descriptions.Footnote ¹¹ While not quite equal to the number of ‘hits’ when using ‘lawyer’ (366 titles), it does suggest that judges are significant figures in ‘legal cinema’ (Levi Reference Levi2005, p. xi). However, in the final instance, existing scholarship suggests the judge is a marginal figure in ‘legal cinema’; rarely central to the moral dilemmas, narrative or character development that tend to be associated with lawyers and advocates (Black, Reference Black and Freeman2005). Nor does the addition of television seem to change this state of affairs (Jarvis and Joseph, Reference Jarvis and Joseph1998; Kleinhans and Morris, Reference Kleinhans, Morris, Murray and Oullette2004). Reality TV is perhaps the exception (Lovell Banks, Reference Lovell Banks2003) and the most frequently cited example is Judge Judy (Kohm, Reference Kohm2006). The absence of lawyers from reality TV judge shows seems to have the effect of putting the judge and the performance of judicial authority at the centre of the picture (Christie, Reference Christie1999). Are there other and earlier visual formats in which the judge is at the centre of the picture? Is there research that examines these images?

3 On judicial portraiture

Judicial portraits are another and a much older cultural form that puts the judge at the centre of the visual image. What, if anything, does existing legal scholarship tell us about this type of judicial image and image making? The little published work that does exist falls into two types. One is a small group of texts, made up of short notes published in legal professional journals recording decisions to commission portraits, detailing unveiling ceremonies and the (re)hangingFootnote ¹² of judicial portraits.Footnote ¹³ These texts provide some, albeit limited, evidence of the production and use of judicial portraits.

Legal historical scholarship is the second type of work making reference to judicial visual images: sculpture, brasses and painting. This is an example of legal scholars using visual images as historical ‘evidence’, for example of styles and changes in judicial dress (Baker, Reference Baker1975; Reference Baker1978). Little or no attention is paid to the history, nature, purpose or use of the judicial image per se. Despite this limitation, the work has particular value. It makes a small but important contribution to the history of the visual images of identified individual holders of judicial office. It suggests that the production of judicial images of named or identifiable individuals is a long-established practice in the Common Law, with its origins in the fourteenth century, probably beginning with effigies and other forms of funeral monument.Footnote ¹⁴ In the context of this long history, the lack of scholarship examining their nature, history, significance or use is rather surprising.

4 On portraiture

Nor am I able to report that portraiture, neglected by legal scholars, has been the subject of extensive and rigorous study in more pertinent disciplines, such as art history. If there is no art historical scholarship on portraits of the judiciary to assist my studies, scholarship on portraiture in general does have considerable relevance (Brilliant, Reference Brilliant1991; Piper, Reference Piper1957; Pope-Hennessy, Reference Pope-Hennessy1966; West, Reference West2004; Woodall, Reference Woodall1997). And two particular bodies of art historical work on portraiture have a close substantive affinity with judicial portraiture: work on portraits of members of professions, and state and official portraits.

General portraiture scholarship suggests that, at least since the nineteenth century, portraiture is informed by the dual demands that the visual image should not only produce the physical likeness of the sitter but also represent the truth of the character and personality of the sitter (Brilliant, Reference Brilliant1991). A second important finding of this work is that portraiture has played a key role in debates about the nature and meaning of identity, recognition, representation and subjectivity (Brilliant, Reference Brilliant1991; Soussloff, Reference Soussloff2006). But these insights need to be put in context, as art history scholarship also suggests that portraits of the judiciary may have rather specific qualities and characteristics; they are not merely portraits of individuals. The dual demands of likeness and truth, and the role of portraiture in identity formation, may take on rather idiosyncratic forms in that context. This is where work on portraits of professionals ,and state and official portraits is of great assistance.

As portraits of legal professionals and portraits of state officials, judicial portraits are a distinct subgenre of portraiture. Portraits of members of professions, Jordanova (Reference Jordanova2000) argues, have particular characteristics and functions. They play a double role in identity formation, first in the self-fashioning of the identity of the individual sitter and secondly in the fashioning of the identity of the institution. The individual’s image is fabricated according to the abstract ideas, values and virtues associated with the institution and the collective. Through the sitter’s image, these institutional values and virtues are not only made, but are made visible, public and accessible. Not only does the making of the visual image play a role in the construction and representation of the identity of the individual sitter, it also plays an extremely important role in the composition and construction of collective identities; the identity of the institution (Jordanova, Reference Jordanova2000, pp. 14–15). Judicial portraits are also state portraits, which Jenkins defines as a distinctive type of portraiture, being representations of rulers or their deputies. As state portraits, the nature of the dual function of the portrait shifts. The image of the individual sitter is fashioned by, and is made to embody and thereby represent, a set of abstract principles, qualities and characteristics of the state (Jenkins, Reference Jenkins1947, p. 1). This is achieved, she argues, by resort to special methods of handling the sitter, using distinctive aesthetic codes designed to give visual form to a particular set of institutional attributes, characteristics and qualities, particularly concerned with social and political rank. But Rosenblum (Reference Rosenblum, Grimshaw, Grenon, Loyrette and Beamish2006) argues that this should not detract us from the fact that these portraits still function as an empirical record ‘of the unique facts of each sitter, an individual to be mistaken for no one else’ (p. 22). This begs the question about the balance between the institutional demands of state portraits and the imperatives of likeness and truth strongly associated with portraiture more generally.

5 Pictures of ‘scarlet and ermine’

A glance at the portraits that make up the dataset of this study, conveniently collected together in the leaflet entitled Chief Justices of New South Wales (see Appendix A),Footnote ¹⁵ may lead you to the common conclusion that these visual images are unworthy of serious consideration; ‘bland … and … predictable … dismissed as vacuous statements and indifferent art’ (Townsend-Gault, Reference Townsend-Gault1988, pp. 511–512). But I would echo Townsend-Gault’s call to resist such a conclusion as the pictures have much to offer.Footnote ¹⁶ The art history scholarship noted above suggests that these judicial pictures not only record the unique features of the individual judicial office-holder, but fashion that subject according to the values and virtues of the institution, thereby making those values and virtues visible and public. Attention to minor detail is essential. Minor changes, various scholars have noted, are indicative of major institutional social, political, philosophical and cultural transformations (Brilliant, Reference Brilliant1991; Burke, Reference Burke2001, pp. 69–71; Schama, Reference Schama1986).

The portraits of the Chief Justices of New South Wales use a limited visual language. Full or three-quarter body poses dominate. The visual preoccupation is the body of the judge, not the face. The face of the sitter, the part of the body that perhaps most clearly differentiates one sitter from another and has well-established associations with the character and individuality of the sitter, makes up a relatively small part of the image. Nor is the overarching objective to represent a perfect likeness of the individual’s physical body: far from it. The sitter’s particular physicality tends to be largely obscured and overwhelmed. The body is little more than a device to hold and display the insignia of office. The voluminous robes and other paraphernalia of judicial dress dominate the painted surface. In those jurisdictions where wigs are still worn (such as New South Wales), individualising characteristics such as hair colour and style, the shape of the face, and the ears are obscured. Facial expressions are standardised; all depict gravity, an enduring austerity, a sturdy tranquillity and deep introspection. It is an austere aesthetics that negates individuality and threatens to render invisible many visible differences, such as gender.Footnote ¹⁷

Nor does this exhaust the similarities between the portraits. A majority set the figure of the judge against a dark background with little or no detail visible. Props, if not absent altogether, are strictly limited (the book is the exception). Both of these compositional features work to minimise distractions and orientate the viewer’s gaze to the symbols of office that cover the body of the sitter. How are we to make sense of these images?

This is a visual language that shapes the image of the subject according to the need to represent the individual as a member of society’s social, political and institutional elites; through symbols of legitimate power, rightful status and valid authority. In the first instance it is an aesthetics long associated with the sovereign. Any image of the sovereign’s body is always an image of a double body (Kantorowicz, Reference Kantorowicz1957); representing the physical/natural body and the body as a symbol that expresses the character and qualities of the institution (cf. Strong, Reference Strong1977; Reference Strong1987). Depictions of the judge, as the sovereign’s representative, follow this tradition of portraying a double body; both natural and symbolic. Likeness and individuality in the judicial portrait are produced according to a rigorous aesthetic language associated with the values and virtues of the judicial institution. The symbols craft the sitter’s identity and generate recognition of the subject by way of some very particular attributes, of majesty, independence, integrity, gravity, dispassion and impartiality. And this is far from being an exhaustive list. Flaws, blemishes, imperfections and idiosyncrasies are of little relevance. The subject is made in the image of an exemplar: the embodiment of the ideal. The addition of a book connects these virtues to a dedication to the word of the law. In this pictorial tradition, the differentiation of one sitter from another is not an aesthetic preoccupation. The opposite is the case; visual continuity is used to shape each judicial subject by way of the virtues of sameness, repetition, endurance and consistency.

Even within this aesthetic tradition it would be wrong to conclude that its slavish reproduction totally erases differences between the various office-holders. But it does suggest that idiosyncrasy has to be made in the service of these virtues. Space permits only one example. The portrait of Chief Justice Kerr (1972–74) is distinctive because of a minor difference; he is bare-headed, holding his full bottom wig. One reading of this by retired Supreme Court judge Roddy Meagher was that the hand-held wig captures something of Chief Justice Kerr’s personality: in this case his vanity. Kerr, Meagher explained, was known to be particularly proud of his full head of hair (Meagher, Reference Meagher2007). A biographical note that accompanies a reproduction of Kerr’s painted portrait in a book, Portraits of the Chief Justices of New South Wales, supports another reading. During the short period of time Kerr occupied the post of Chief Justice, Bennett explains, he played a key role in developing new administrative structures, reducing the bureaucratic burden affecting the judges; ‘The Chief Justice, by force of his personality has achieved these results’ (Bennett, Reference Bennett1977, p. 61). The wig in the hand, flouting centuries of tradition, may be a reference to not just the personality of the office-holder but the fashioning of that personality as a sign of a particular (and maybe changing) quality and virtue of the institution: a strong personality, a moderniser, efficiency and superior management skills.

If the preoccupation of my analysis so far has been the identification and analysis of the visual language that is common to the portraits that make up this dataset, I now want to examine a number of visual ‘differences’. The first is the portrait of the Honourable Sir Laurence Street (Chief Justice from 1974 to 1988). It is a photographic portrait. It provides an opportunity to reflect upon the impact of the technology of the camera upon the judicial image. A picture of Chief Justice Murray Gleeson (1988–1998), attached to his biographical file on the Court website, is the basis for a second reflection, this time focusing on aesthetics. The pose is radically different, a cropped image concentrating on the sitter’s head and shoulders. Symbols of judicial office appear to be totally missing. How are we to make sense of this very different judicial portrait?

6 The impact of technology on judicial portraits

The photograph of Chief Justice Laurence StreetFootnote ¹⁸ is not a copy of the painted portrait that hangs in the vestibule of the Banco Court. There are some things, some assumptions and expectations, that the painted and photographic portraits of this judge share. The first is the empirical quality of the picture. Both painted and photographic portraits depict that particular individual; both are a record of his existence. But this is also the point at which the two formats begin to separate. The surface of the painted image tends to display signs of the fabrication of the image, particularly the painter’s marks: the brush strokes. This may raise doubts about the empirical qualities of a portrait. Was it painted from life?Footnote ¹⁹ It may also draw attention to the truth claims of portraiture; the signs of the artist’s work may be read as evidence of the manipulation that is taken as a necessary part of making the painted image of the sitter. Key assumptions about the nature of a photographic picture threaten to erase these concerns. John Tagg (Reference Tagg1998) explains:

This ‘realist position’ emphasises the strong indexical qualities associated with the photographic image; the picture is an unmediated record of the thing in front of the camera. The technology reinforces ‘the realist position’ by way of its apparent capacity to record objects in minute detail, offering an antidote to the more evident mediations of painted portraits, perfecting and idealising the sitter (especially the face) or erasing the subject under symbols of office. Understood as a process that ‘merely’ records, photography threatens to erase the impact of the image maker (and one could add the sitter and the commissioning parties) upon image making.

How do these realist assumptions impact on photographic portraits of judges? To answer that question I turn to a collection of thirty-five photographic portraits of Chief Justice Laurence Street in the State Library of New South Wales. It includes the photographic portrait in this case study. All date from 1974, the time of Street’s appointment.Footnote ²⁰ The library catalogue tells us only of the institutional origin of the pictures: the New South Wales Government Printing Office. The image maker is nameless.

The thirty-five photographs show Chief Justice Street in thirty-five different poses. In some he stands, in others he sits. Sometimes he is immediately before the camera, sometimes behind a desk. He stands to the side of the desk, by a marble fireplace or by a chair. There is less variation in the backdrop (a wall of books). Props are limited (the book again). The pose varies; sometimes the book is held close, high on the chest with both hands, sometimes with one hand, sometimes at waist height. The face also varies: looking to the left, right, direct at the camera/viewer, sometimes down. The expression tends to be fixed with an enduring, inner depth. But sometimes he has a benign smile. And then there is the question of the use of judicial robes. Scarlet, ermine and full bottom wig make an appearance in maybe half of the images. In others he wears a smart, plain and sober business suit. And this far from exhausts the differences.

The existence of these thirty-five photographs challenges the ‘realist’ assumptions of photographic portraits of the judiciary, as collectively they are evidence of the work that goes into forming the photographic image of the judge. While each photographic portrait of Chief Justice Street does indeed record a single moment in which the sitter appeared before the camera, captured in previously unimaginable detail, that single moment depends upon (and needs to be reconnected to) a longer process of picture making and image management involving many social interactions, evaluations and decisions that impact upon the look of the image.

Of particular interest here is the way in which many of these thirty-five images show a clear connection between the different technology of image production, the camera, and the aesthetics of a picture-making tradition (painting) that long predates the advent of the camera. Many of the poses, backgrounds, props, etc. found in the photographic portraits draw upon a pre-photographic visual language of judicial portraiture. The different technology of image making does not, in this example, lead to the wholesale abandonment of the earlier aesthetic tradition associated with another type and technology of image production.

Applying these insights to the photographic portrait of Chief Justice Street, what conclusions can be drawn about the impact of photography upon the image of Chief Justices? One conclusion is that the photographic image is unremarkable; its difference is barely recognisable. It is still an image that forms the subject of the picture according to an older visual language that represents the subject as a member of a political and institutional elite. Here, the technology of the camera is connected to this older aesthetic tradition. The camera reproduces this aesthetic code in a new medium. Tagg (Reference Tagg1998, p. 57) suggests that this may work to attach the ‘aura’ of the older pictorial tradition (in this instance, the painted image) to the photographic image. Rather than abolishing what Walter Benjamin (Reference Benjamin and Benjamin1973) called the ‘cult’ value of the painted picture, this photographic portrait seems to reproduce it and redeploy it (Latour and Lowe, forthcoming).

At the same time, this image of Chief Justice Street is also something of a dramatic departure from all of the images in my dataset that preceded it.Footnote ²¹ In comparison with all of the earlier images, it is unrivalled in its empirical qualities: in its ability to capture the detail of the individual office-holder (the shape of his face and hands, in the likeness of his eyes, and so on) and in the accuracy of the reproduction. The time the image of the Chief Justice is produced has also changed. The painted portrait is made and displayed at the end of the institutional life of the office holder. The photograph was produced at the start of his period in office, suggesting that the photographic portrait may have a different function, and a different institutional life than the painted portrait. The cost and ease of production and reproduction are reduced, potentially widening the circulation of the judicial image.

7 Towards a new aesthetics?

In the second reflection I want to consider the photographic portrait of Chief Justice Gleeson attached to his biographical sketch on the Court website (see Appendix B). Unlike the painted portrait of Chief Justice Gleeson that hangs in the Banco Court or the photographic portrait that graces the Chief Justices pdf file, the photographic image on his biographical page is aesthetically very different from the other images in the dataset. This picture makes no reference to the ‘scarlet and ermine’ tradition. The face, not the body, dominates, taking up over half of the picture. The little clothing visible takes the form of a business suit, a white shirt and a conservative tie. There appear to be no references to the symbols or props of judicial office. The composition and the pose of the face are also different. This is a ‘head on’ or a ‘frontal’ pose, not a three-quarter face. The gaze is direct, positioning the viewer at the same level as the sitter.

The focus upon the sitter’s head and shoulders is one that art historians associate with ‘informal’ portraits (Piper, Reference Piper1957, p. 161). It is a pose and a scale associated with intimacy, familiarity and closeness between the sitter and the viewer, rather than remoteness, distance and hierarchy. It is a format commonly found in private, not public, settings. The head and shoulders pose is associated with the depiction of individual character and personality rather than an office or institution. But the use of this visual language in a picture that graces the Supreme Court website suggests that it is an aesthetics that has official support and currency. We ought not to forget that this is a portrait of a judge. It is still a ‘state’ portrait.

As such it needs to be understood within the picture-making tradition set out above in which the sitter is portrayed as the embodiment of the qualities and virtues of the institution. Allard (Reference Allard, Grimshaw, Grenon, Loyrette and Beamish2006), commenting upon the emergence in the nineteenth century of the use of this intimate and informal style to portray important political figures, explains that the emphasis upon the individuality of the sitter rather than the symbols of office expresses ‘democratic and bourgeois principles’ (p. 82). The qualities and characteristics of the institution and the social status attached to the elite in this new context are not, he suggests, missing but are now coded in a different way. Status now has to be represented using a certain discretion. It is now ‘not so much [what] is shown as the manner in which it is shown that betokens dignity and exemplarity of the illustrious man’ (p. 83). The character expressed in the face of the sitter now carries much of the burden of representing the institution.

Does this emphasis upon the face of the individual reveal more about the office-holder as an individual? Historians of photography have traced the emergence of the ‘head and shoulders’ composition, the development and use of the full-face pose, the horizontal gaze, the blank background. All appear in photographic portraiture used to develop the ‘sciences’ of physiognomy and phrenology, in anthropological projects seeking to establish taxonomies of civilisations, cultures, racial and ethnic categories, in medical and criminological projects dedicated to the identification of the signs of pathology and deviance. It is an aesthetics associated with and designed to fashion, not the image of the powerful and the elite in a society, but to produce the image of the weak, the dispossessed and the marginal in society. It is an aesthetics associated with new strategies of governance, with enhanced surveillance and increased subordination (Tagg, Reference Tagg1998, p. 5). A feature common to these projects was a desire to capture the individuality of the sitter in order to position the subject of the picture within a grid of meaning that enabled the viewer to differentiate between the normal and the pathological. While the camera appeared to be capable of capturing an abundance of detail, in order to be useful this detail had to be managed: to be reduced. The head and shoulder composition produces ‘more’ information by means of an aesthetics that simplifies: reducing the information. It is a composition that works like a caricature.

The aesthetics that informs the head and shoulder portrait of Chief Justice Gleeson produces something of a paradox. On the one hand it uses a visual language associated with intimacy, and greater openness, offering greater insight into the truth of the sitter by way of emphasising the head and face. And at the same time that aesthetics generates the identity of the subject by stripping away detail, by reducing the information. When applied to the image of a Chief Justice, these insights leave us with a conundrum. What does an image informed by the head and shoulder aesthetics communicate about the office of Chief Justice and about this particular office-holder?

When we look at the cropped photo portrait of Chief Justice Gleeson, what we see, in relation to the other images in this case-study, is something of a radical (modernising) departure. It potentially suggests a judicial subject and institution refashioned for a bourgeois democracy, shorn of the trappings of aristocratic elitism. It also connotes an institution that offers a new intimacy and a new openness between the judiciary, as a powerful political elite, and the viewer, the people. It may also suggest something of a new emphasis upon the individuality of the office-holder as a key judicial virtue and a new way of fashioning the legitimacy of judicial office. Its veracity may also suggest that a new willingness to be public is also a judicial virtue: the idiosyncrasies of the individual’s character and personality are not now to be erased, but put on display.

At the same time, it is an image that resorts to a visual language that reduces information. This is a face that has had individual variation taken out by way of standardisation. As an aesthetics that ‘makes public’, it achieves that goal by reducing the information it makes public. When used to fashion (to make public) the institution of the judge, rather than being a subject that is obscured by the clutter of the ‘scarlet and ermine’, now the individual and institutional subject is obscured in an unexpected manner. The face itself becomes not only the symbol that reveals but also the symbol that obscures and renders opaque the individual and the institution. In many respects the face has become the visual assemblage that does the same symbolic work that the ‘scarlet and ermine’ tradition is now associated with.

8 Hanging the judicial heads

If the meaning of the images is in part produced in and through the visual language and the composition of the picture, work by scholars such as Marcia Pointon (Reference Pointon1993) draws attention to the importance of context (the organisation and use of images) upon meaning. In the final section of this paper, I want to briefly examine ‘the hanging’ of the portraits to consider the contribution that location and organisation make to their meanings. I begin with the painted portraits that are displayed in or near the Banco Court. Thereafter I briefly consider the impact of their reproduction in other locations, in Bennett’s book the Portraits of the Chief Justices of New South Wales, and on the website of the Court.

The painted portraits of the Chief Justices all hang in or adjacent to the Banco Court;Footnote ²² the largest and most elaborately and expensively furnished Court in the Supreme Court building. It is both a working courtroom and the court where key ceremonial events take place. The display of the painted portraits in this particular location highlights their status as precious objects, and as symbolic objects.

Inside the courtroom, paintings cover three walls. Looking from the bench the sequence begins on the extreme right with the portrait of the first Chief Justice, Sir Francis Forbes (1823–1837). It ends on the far left with the portrait of Chief Justice Gleeson (1988–1998), who preceded the current office-holder. Chronological succession and temporal continuity appear to be the organising principles of the hang. But such a conclusion would be wrong.

The fourth and final portrait on the first wall breaks the chronological order. It is not of the fourth Chief Justice, the Honourable Sir James Martin (1873–1886), who is depicted in the scarlet and ermine robes, but a portrait of the fifth office-holder, Chief Justice Sir Julian Emanuel Salomons (12–27 November 1886). This is a small painting that shows the head and shoulders of the sitter dressed in civilian clothes.Footnote ²³ But the abandonment of chronological continuity is not the wholesale abandonment of the organising principle of continuity. We need to reconsider the method of depiction. Now the visualisation of continuity takes priority. The portrait of the fifth Chief Justice hangs out of chronological sequence as it shares a palette of sombre browns and black in common with the other pictures on that wall.Footnote ²⁴ Somewhat perversely, the visualisation of institutional continuity disrupts the chronological continuity, relegating it to secondary significance.

On the other two walls of the Court, again strict chronology is sacrificed to visual continuity. At least one picture (of Chief Justice Martin, 1873–1886) is out of sequence, and the pictures of other Chief Justices are ‘missing’. What connects the pictures is the visual spectacle of colour and composition; expanses of scarlet, ripples of white fur trim and judicial wigs, pose, sparse backgrounds and limited props. Their similarity visualises and celebrates the enduring virtues and values of judicial authority.

The ‘missing’ portraits of four of the Chief Justices hang outside the Court above stairs leading to the Court’s public seating. What factors inform this hanging? A shared aesthetics is one answer.Footnote ²⁵ All are of a similar size: large imposing full-body portraits. All of the subjects are standing, dressed in the scarlet and ermine robes and full bottom wig. Positioned high on the walls above the viewer, the hanging exacerbates the compositional emphasis upon the body, further obscuring the face. Another organising principle is genealogy. This is not just institutional (representing the transmission of power from office-holder to office-holder) but also biological: of father and son. Three of the four portraits depict members of the same family, the Street family, who occupied the office of Chief Justice of New South Wales. Their display has another important quality. Placed high in a lofty void above the open-sided stairs that lead into the Court, the pictures almost disappear into the darkness. The judicial figures loom over the viewer. The hanging offers perhaps the most vivid and memorable visual performance of judicial authority as majesty and awe.

Before leaving the Banco Court, I want to make one final point about the hanging in that location. It dates from 1977 and marks a dramatic shift. On that date, much of the business of the Supreme Court was relocated from the old to the new courthouse. It is a key moment in the modernisation of the Court, moving from an aging courthouse with its origins and aesthetics in the nineteenth century (part classical, part gothic) to a new office complex, with a brutalist concrete machine aesthetic. It is a radical break with the past; with tradition. The movement of the portraits mirrors this movement from old to the new but produces an effect that one might not expect. The relocation and re-hanging represents something of a perverse break with the past. The new hanging stages a vision of continuity and tradition that had not previously existed. Prior to the move the portraits had been dispersed in various courts and corridors (Bennett, Reference Bennett1977, p. 4). In short, the hanging puts judicial portraiture to work to fashion the new departure as tradition: as an event embedded in legal and institutional continuity (Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1992).

It is important not to forget that these portraits are in a fixed location. As such, their audience is limited to those who are in or near the court on the thirteenth floor of the building. As such the ‘public’ nature of these images, and their audience, is somewhat confined. While not limited to the judges, the legal professionals that use the court and the officials that work in the courts, with the exception of the litigants, the mass public is not their main audience.

Technology (the printing press, the camera and more recently the Internet) potentially changes this, increasing the size, broadening the geographical impact and shifting the compositional balance of the audience away from predominantly a Court-based audience. The role and impact of the printing press, in facilitating these changes, is hardly a new state of affairs. The reproduction of painted state portraits (prints, etchings, drawings) with the avowed aim of widening dissemination has a long history (Clayton, Reference Clayton, Grimshaw, Grenon, Loyrette and Beamish2006; Montrose, Reference Montrose1999; Pointon, Reference Pointon1993). An example of printing being used to widen dissemination of the portraits in this study is found in the context of a book, Portraits of the Chief Justices of New South Wales, commissioned to coincide with the move to the new courthouse. Through that book, Chief Justice Laurence Street wanted to make these pictures ‘more accessible to the public’ (Bennett, Reference Bennett1977, p. 4). More recent technology, the Internet, also has a potential to change (widen) access, though there is a need for caution here. The portraits on the Court website are a very small part of a large complex website containing a wide variety of court and law information. The chances of the public viewing the portraits on the web may be as unlikely as them viewing the original portraits in the Banco Court.

These relocations impact not only upon the way the pictures are displayed, but also on their composition and thereby potentially on their meaning. Again space dictates that I only give one example. In Bennett’s book, chronology is the overriding factor influencing the display of the pictures. They are organised according to the needs of strict temporal succession. Does this undermine the role of the visual in representing the continuity? In short the answer is ‘no’. But a different approach to visualising continuity is to be found in this book. Now all the pictures are edited. All are the same size. Some are severely edited. This affects the composition. No full-body portraits remain. The edit emphasises the head and the upper part of the body. The signs of office diminish in importance. The effect is a greater concordance between the temporal and the aesthetic.Footnote ²⁶ Last but not least, the pictures now work in conjunction with an accompanying text, which if read narrates the meaning of the picture or adds a visual dimension to the text.

8 A few methodological notes

Finally, a few notes on methodology. If the rise in the study of visual culture, especially in sociology, has generated methodological reflection and changes in methodological practices (Prosser, Reference Prosser1998; Pink, Reference Pink2001; Rose, Reference Rose2001) in that discipline, there is less evidence of this taking place in socio-legal scholarship on visual culture. For example, in the ‘Introduction’ to the edited collection Law’s Moving Image (Reference Moran, Sandon, Loizidou and Christie2004), my colleagues and I complained that in much law and film scholarship the visual aspects of film are largely ignored. In another reflection on methodology in this context, Gies (Reference Gies2008) has noted the continuing failure of scholars working on law and visual media to undertake audience research that is common in other disciplinary contexts where visual media is studied. In the limited space available here I want to briefly comment on the methodologies used in this paper to explore the interface between the judiciary and visual culture and outline some of the limitations and alternatives, and thereby raise the profile of methodological issues in socio-legal visual research.

One approach used in this paper is content analysis; identifying judicial portraits, cataloguing their key and recurring compositional characteristics and noting changes that take place over time. A second methodological approach draws upon semiology (sometimes called semiotics). Again the focus is on the image itself, but this time the objective is to explore and analyse the particular way the aesthetics and the technologies of image making work to generate meanings. And there has been some reference to the way in which changes in the image may form and echo institutional changes over time.Footnote ²⁷ One problem with both of these approaches is that they work with the assumption that meaning and meaning making can be limited to that which is inside the frame of the image. One way in which this essay seeks to break out of this limitation is by making some reference to aesthetics as a historical and institutional phenomenon. The art historical scholarship referred to above notes that changes in portraiture are closely associated with wider changes in politics and in social and institutional formations. All impact upon the ability of the images to make (and sometime to fail to make) meanings that are legible. The impact of changing technology upon visual image making and meaning making is another contextual factor, as scholarship on the camera and photography shows, and may have a profound effect on the nature and meanings generated by way of visual images.

There are also limitations to this study and references in the paper to other methodological approaches that I have not been able to explore in detail. One is the role of the audience upon meaning making.Footnote ²⁸ In the process of presenting this paper and the accompanying images at various seminars, I have become acutely aware of the multiplicity of readings judicial pictures may generate, some of which have been incorporated into this analysis. Much of the paper explores the meaning of existing objects. New data, generated by way of interviews (for example in the reference to an interview I undertook with Justice Roddy Meagher), has only played a small part in this particular paper.Footnote ²⁹

9 Conclusion

Epstein and Knight’s (Reference Epstein, Knight and Sarat2004) survey of socio-judicial research shows that it is not only an area of scholarship that is alive and well but also a significant growth area. If their overview points to the rich multidisciplinary nature of that research, my point of departure is that their conceptualisation of that research landscape is problematic. It fails to recognise judicial research that acknowledges the importance of culture in the formation of social and institutional legal relations and work that refuses to be limited by a strict disciplinary division between the social sciences and the humanities. There is a body of research that is beginning to explore the formation of judicial authority in culture, particularly through the popular medium of newspapers. And, work on film and television has put visual culture firmly on that agenda. But my argument is that work on visual culture and the judiciary is poorly developed. More specifically, too little attention has been paid to the visual. This paper turns to art historical scholarship on portraiture and work on photography to interrogate the visual aspects of a judicial cultural phenomenon, portraits of judges in a particular common-law setting. Using a small sample of pictures, it explores the visual language that this tradition of judicial image making draws upon and offers an analysis of the way that this aesthetic tradition works to make the meaning of judicial authority in visual culture. It also seeks to explore and understand the impact and effect that technological and aesthetic changes have upon visual representations of judicial authority and the judicial institution. But standing alone, this paper can offer little more than a fragment of what has the potential to be a much bigger project on judicial image making and judicial image management.

Judicial portraits, as pictures of a key legal institution and office-holders in that institution, commissioned by the legal profession and viewed almost exclusively by members of that profession, and sometimes put on display for a wider public audience, offer an opportunity to examine the nature and role of visual culture in the formation of individual and institutional subjects. The argument developed here suggests that through portraiture, individuals, groups and institutions fashion and make public a range of key ideas, values and virtues about law in general and the judge in particular. Their role in the formation of the identities of not only those who are the subjects of these pictures, and the professions and the institutions that they embody, but also the audiences that view them, is little understood. If many of the images considered in this paper visualise the judge and the Chief Justice in particular according to an aesthetics long associated with representations of the sovereign and aristocratic and landed elites there is some evidence that it is a visual language that is being abandoned in the fashioning of new institutional qualities and virtues. But my analysis suggests that the modernising project resorts to an aesthetics that is also fraught and problematic.

While technological change, the advent of the camera, may have little apparent effect upon the aesthetic traditions central to the depiction of the judiciary, it does have the potential to contribute to making pictures of the judiciary more easily and more cheaply available both for elite consumption and for mass circulation. But the potential for mass dissemination of these images does not necessarily mean that they will be more widely spread or that they will be seen. Easier access and wider circulation may turn what were once revered precious objects keenly observed into valueless disposable objects, ignored, deleted. An ironic effect of an epoch defined by way of the rise and rise of visual culture may be the production of an indifference to the visual and new invisibilities.

My objectives for this paper are modest. If it has communicated some of the potential of studying the interface between the judiciary and visual culture and some of the methodological approaches and challenges of that project, then I for one will be satisfied that it has achieved its modest objectives. Redrawing the boundaries of the canon of judicial research either generally or under the banner of scholarship that explores law as a complex of social and cultural relations is a rather bigger project and may take a little longer, but it is also one I want to engage with.

Appendix A

Chief Justices of New South Wales leaflet is reproduced here as a facsimile and a PDF can also be viewed in colour online as ‘Supplementary data’ at Cambridge Journals Online: www.journals.cup.org/abstract_S1744552309990139.

Appendix B

Supreme Court of New South Wales web file photograph of The Honourable Anthony Murray Gleeson Chief Justice Supreme Court New South Wales 1988–1998 is reproduced here with the permission of the Supreme Court of NSW (www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lawlink/supreme_court/II_sc.nsf/pages/SCO_cjgleeson) as a facsimile and a PDF can also be viewed in colour online as ‘Supplementary data’ at Cambridge Journals Online: www.journals.cup.org/abstract_S1744552309990139.