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Ignorance is Bliss until its your Brother.

Someone it’s reported missing every 90 seconds in the UK. (Hunter, Allan and Rickford, 2023) 

Of that, Black people make up 13-14% of all missing persons cases, while only making up 4% of the UK population. 


Statistics that seemingly feels glazed over by authorities when reading over the Missing People and Listen Ups’  report, “We’re told not to make everything about race, but it is about race”, which brings home the message that the considerably disproportionate number of black children going missing, making up 16% of all missing children cases. The report also goes on to state that ‘Black children are more likely to stay missing for longer, less likely to be identified as vulnerable due to exploitation or mental health issues, and less likely to be found by the police than White children.’ (Missing People and ListenUp, 2024). Contrastingly, analysis conducted by Slakoff and Fradella, of news articles reveals a consistent trend: Missing White women and children are more likely to garner media attention than missing minority women and the same issue being also co-current in adolescent disappearances. Cases like Richard Okorogheye, a 19 year old whom went missing in 2021 from his home and was later found drowned in a pond located in Epping Forest months later, are narrated through social media campaigns as not being newsworthy and not likely to to be profitable for the productions involved in their commercial recounts of the investigation. ‘Based on a True Story’  a Missing People social media campaign visualises one space in which biases and the unfortunate subsequent silencing of these stories happen, as a TV production team discuss and finalise what true crime documentary they choose to publicised. 


Alexander Sloley, [my brother] a 16 year old who went missing 2 days before his birthday is brought up as a potential story for the editors to invest in, when one of the editors makes a note about him ‘smoking a little bit of pot’ (Missing People, 2026) the proposal is turned down due to the audience not being able to sympathise with ‘a gang member’ although the word ‘gang’ was never used to describe him or his activity. (Missing People, 2026)



It took 3 years. 

3 years of no police appeals, press coverage - nothing. 

Alex's name and story was contained in vacuum of my families cries falling on deaf ears.

Because he smoked weed? 

Its a plant. 


My practice as a darkroom photographer and printer started as a desire to see what once was; what is and what will be neglected. 

Through the darkness of losing you, I found purpose - meaning and finally the reason to why I started this all in the beginning - You.  

Had I not lost you, I may have still been oblivious to the structures that hide our Black children. 

I would’ve been apart of the problem.  Apart of me, being Alex’s sister questions  - had my brother been darker with dark features, would there be enough done by the authorities to articulate my point in this research? Would Missing People chosen to put my brothers face on the Iceland milk cartons, would News anchors? Would the millions who reposted my interview online kept his name alive for so long it forced the police to put at a £10,000 reward?   I think about the stories of other young black boys who are still missing, and who have never been afforded the space to have their name shared, their story heard and their disappearance solved -  I think about my brothers blue eyes, blonde hair  and a fair complexion and cry because he had looked like me ; he would’ve just been another ‘Black boy’  robbed of that Black joy I know exists. 



Visibility is critical within a disappearance; it accessibility and its formation actively shapes the urgency in which a case is investigated, circulated and responded to. 


Public appeals rely heavily on photographic portraits to broadcast the physical attributes obtained by the missing, whom is uninvolved in the distribution of their likeliness, becomes an objective stand in for their absent body. Through police appeals, news broadcasts, posters and social media campaigns, images become evidence that a person existed, was loved and is being searched for. When those images are not circulated, or when a case receives little public attention, disappearance occurs twice; first through their physical absence and secondly through their neglect in public consciousness. 


For Black bodies, this secondary disappearance is often reinforced through institutional practises that fail to generate the same level visibility afford to white victims as discussed earlier, commonly known as ‘White Missing Girl Syndrome’. The issue isn’t just about who goes missing, but whose disappearance is considered worthy of documentation, circulation and collective concern. Question of visibility are inseparable from question of evidence. If the public understanding of a missing person is mediated through photographs then the image itself becomes a site where value, vulnerability and legitimacy are negotiated.

 

It is at the intersection of disappearance, visibility and photographic evidence that I find purpose in the darkroom. Through auto-ethnographic retellings and practice-based inquiry, I rework media imagery, police photography, forensic accounts, personal archives and missing person reports in order to examine how photographic evidence is produced, circulated and understood within institutional frameworks. 

I do not arrive at this research as a detached observer. I arrive here as Lattina Da'Costa, the sister of Alexander Issachar Sloley. My position within this work is not something to be removed in pursuit of objectivity, but something that actively informs the questions being asked. The disappearance of my brother forms the foundation from which this research emerges and shapes the materials, images and archives examined throughout the chapter.

This chapter serves as a site of inquiry into the material objects and visual systems that participate in the construction of meaning, memory and truth. Through darkroom experimentation, archival collecting, visual analysis and personal testimony, I investigate the relationship between disappearance and photographic evidence, paying particular attention to the ways institutions produce, preserve and circulate images in response to missing person cases.

While this conversation has been compressed into a chapter, its depth extends far beyond these pages. Beginning with missing person cases and questions of visibility, the chapter moves through archives, darkroom methodologies, forensic imaging and police photography to examine how evidence is produced and stabilised. Rather than treating photographs as neutral records of reality, I approach them as material objects shaped by the conditions of their production, preservation and circulation. In doing so, the chapter asks not only how photographs make people visible, but how systems of visibility determine whose lives, absences and histories are allowed to remain visible at all.




Darkroom | Forensic | Archives 



Etymology of the word archive : 

‘Arkheia’ (singular) : Public records 

‘Arkheion’ (plural) town hall, public building

‘Arkhē’ : government rule and authority.  (Harper, n.d.)


The archive from its conception has been considered as official knowledge, that has been  contained and catalogued. ‘Whether it was (or is) an institution that wants to categorise its objects through photographs [...] or whether it is through individual photographers who construct a taxonomy of objects through their photographs [...] the aim is always the same: to provide a corpus of images that represent – and can be consulted about – a specific object. This means that photographs are almost always to be found within the conception of practice as an “archive”.” (Lashmar, 2024, 7). The term therefore points towards structures and conditions through which historical records become preserved, distributed and accessed, meaning that the archive does not simply store the subject being documented, but actively shapes how that subject is later understood.


I started collecting images and memorable ‘found things’ after you went missing . It started off with an image of me you and Tazrah and has grown into old CV’s , football team group photographs, college lanyards - anything to make me feel closer to you. I even found a letter you wrote to mum after an argument , that’s the only reason I know you were a mummy’s boy.


If archives determine how photographs are preserved, chemistry determines whether photographs can exist at all.  The darkroom  serves as a site of image production, yet it can also be understood as a site of evidential construction, where visibility emerges through a series of controlled material interactions. 

Darkroom practise stands of 3 integral pillar; chemistry, light and surface. 

Photographic film and its light sensitive properties are due to silver halide crystal, combined with gelatin to create a thin layer, on plastic acetate. After being exposed to light, the film is drowned in chemistry in which silver ions dissolve and form silver crystals and produce the latent image.   

The chemistry in question is a 3 step process of reducing agent, stopping agent and fixing agent that is highly reliant on the reducing agents capabilities of donating electrons to the silver ions. On the Harman Ilford developer specs guide, it states ‘During development, temperature control is important, and you must use an accurate photographic thermometer to make sure the developer is not too hot or too cold’ (Ilford Photo, 2003) as to ensure you don’t over/under develop your images. In Steve Anchells’ ‘The Film  developing cookbook’, he lists and compares historical and contemporary phenolic(1) film developers reactivity, accessibility and their visual properties. The visibility of grain (2) and  ‘granularity varies depending on the films sensitivity also known ISO : high ISO films generally have more noticeable grain’ (McKay, 2026) The Silver halides grains are crystalline structures however, not all film is created equally. Film stocks such as Kodak T-Max and Ilford Delta series rely on tabular (T-Grain) technology that give them their known smoother and finer grain, while most film stocks use the traditional cubic grain structures, giving them a more irregular textured look. (McKay, 2026) This visualisation of grain is not just determined by its atomic structure, but also demonstrates how environmental and economical changes both spatially and politically can effectively distort and interfere with image production.


All darkroom practitioners I know have such a methodical and idiosyncratic ways of working. My boss uses cotton swabs dipped in bleach and dabs it on his prints to bring out the white in eyes and reflections, I have a friend who will book the studio for one week,  spend one day cleaning the whole space, he’ll print 1 image in 1 batch of 1:100 Ilford Ilfosol 3 developer and then he throws it away, simply because he believes he’s exhausted the chemistry already -  I have friends who have on many occasions forgotten the number 1 rule and opened the photographic paper box in daylight. 


I personally like shooting low ISO in low lighting environments and pushing the values while developing. Although there’s many ways of working in the darkroom, there known variables that determine the ‘quality’ and presentation of your prints.  These include using white gloves when handling prints and negatives to ensure no fingerprints and natural oils stain your work, not agitating your chemistry too aggressively and not letting prints and negatives sit in chemical baths for long periods of time. Outside the chemical variables , I stopped using white gloves a long time ago. It felt like a massive part of my process was being lost. 


 I fear if I died, no one would’ve known I had existed , at least with my DNA embedded in a print, no one could ever say Lattina Da’Costa didn’t exist. 


While undertaken for different purposes, both darkroom practice and forensic investigation rely upon carefully regulated methodologies designed to preserve the integrity of the material being examined. In both cases, evidence does not simply emerge on its own; it is produced through a series of decisions regarding handling, preservation and interpretation. With this knowledge can we question if a photograph only appears because of the specific chemical processes, can photographic evidence ever be severed from  the conditions that produced it? 

Grain and visual resolution in this chapter is not considered an aesthetic texture or a technical imperfection of analogue photography, but as materialised trace of fragmentation within a photograph. Through a forensic lens, grain operates as a limit condition of legibility, where the image begins to lose its capacity to function as viable evidence. The visualisation of grain in photography marks the point at which  details becomes uncertain; and where what is visible cannot be fully verified through clarity alone.  Instead of producing clarity, grain exposes the instability of photographic evidence itself. It reveals how images can never exist as fully transparent records, but are always subject to degradation and material noise produced through chemical and environmental conditions. Grain, operating as a point where absence, incomplete evidence and memories become unstable by-products of visibility, reflecting on the authoritative structures that determine whose lives are signified  by photographic records and whose history is lost within development.


Image chemistry is Kush


Throughout this chapter, cannabis repeatedly appears within the narratives attached to Black bodies. It appears in police reports, media representations and public discussions as a cultural signifier through which vulnerability becomes obscured and criminality is implied. Alexander Sloley's disappearance has been repeatedly framed through references to cannabis use, despite there being no evidence that it contributed to his disappearance.

 Similar narratives emerge throughout missing person cases involving young Black men, where discussions surrounding drugs frequently eclipse discussions surrounding welfare, vulnerability and care. Within photographic chemistry however cannabis occupies a very different directive. In the ‘The film developing cookbook’ mentioned earlier Anchell, he goes on to say most organic substances are able to develop film including ‘polluted lake and river water, old red wine, citrus fruit juice, blood and urine’ (Anchell and Troop, 1998) this is due to the naturally occurring phenolic compounds found in aromatic plants including cannabis. The decision to construct a cannabis-based developer was therefore both chemical and conceptual. If photography functions as a system through which visibility is produced, what happens when a substance repeatedly associated with criminality is repurposed to generate images? Can a material so often used to signify danger instead participate in acts of visual recovery? Using a modified cannabis-based developer, a roll of black and white film was processed as part of a practice-based investigation into photographic chemistry and image formation. The experiment sought to explore the relationship between material process and representation, examining how substances associated with criminality might be reconfigured within acts of image production.



CANNANOL EXPERIMENT 1


Film Type / ISO CAMERA

CANNABIS FLOWER

STANDARD DEVELOPMENT FOMADON R09 1:25 TIME

CANNABIS DEVELEOPMENT TIME

TEMP (CELSUIS)

VISIBLE VISUAL DATA

(0-10)

OBSERVATIONS

HYPOTHESIS

CONCLUSIONS

ORITENTAL SEGAGULL ISO 100


CANON FT 28MM

CREAMY KEES GP - SAF - CK THC 24:1 (HYBRID INDICA)

7M 30S

7M 30S

20

0

UNDEREXPOSED WITH NO VISIBLE FRAMES

NO VISUAL DATA WILL BE EXTRACTED THROUGH BOTH DIGITAL SCANS AND DARKROOM PRINTING

  • ISO TOO LOW

  • FAULT WITH MANUAL CAMERA

  • FILLER INGREIDENTS THAT COUNTERACT REDUCING AGENTS POTENCY

The first experiment resulted in negative produced no visible image data.



At first I was mad.

 However, ironically the blank negatives felt appropriate. I had spent months retracing Alexanders movements, researching and attempting to recover fragments that may help aid the the investigation. [REDACTED] Road, according to the police, was an alias address used by Alex when he had been arrested. This address, until discussed in a meeting with the detectives, was unknown my family. How cruelly ironic that out of all my photowalks, the one that had

photographs of [REDACTED] Road  came back with nothing. 


If the first experiment became a study of absence, the second became a study of visibility. Using a revised recipe, the second roll successfully produced image data. The resulting negatives contained recognisable images that display Arsenal fans celebrating the teams first Premiere League championships in over two decades, allowing details to emerge across the frame where the first experiment had returned only blank film. Yet the photographs continued to bear visible traces of their production. Grain, bio-residue, tonal shifts and chemical irregularities remained embedded within the negatives, revealing the material conditions responsible for their existence. Rather than understanding these marks as technical imperfections, I read them as evidence of process. The photographs do not conceal their construction; they openly display it. In doing so, the experiment shifted from asking whether visibility could be produced to examining how visibility itself is constructed. While the first experiment returned only absence, the second produced a visible trace. Together, the two tests demonstrate that photographic evidence is neither natural nor inevitable. Just as photographs rely upon material systems capable of producing visibility,  a missing person relies upon institutional systems capable of generating public recognition and urgency. In both instances, absence does not necessarily indicate non-existence. Instead, it may reveal a failure in the processes responsible for making something visible in the first place.   


CANNANOL EXPERIMENT 2

Film Type / ISO CAMERA

CANNABIS FLOWER

STANDARD DEVELOPMENT FOMADON R09 1:25 TIME

CANNABIS DEVELEOPMENT TIME

TEMP (CELSUIS)

VISIBLE VISUAL DATA

(0-10)

OBSERVATIONS

HYPOTHESIS

CONCLUSIONS

ILFORD DELTA 3200


YASHICA AF 230

CREAMY KEES GP - SAF - CK THC 24:1 (HYBRID INDICA)

11M

17M 30S

20

3

  • UNDEREXPOSED AND UNDERDEVELOPED WITH LIMITED VISUAL DATA


  • NEGATIVE WAS LEFT WITH A STICKY RESIDUE AFTER FINAL WATER WASH



  • WILL BE ABLE TO EXTRACT HIGH CONTRAST INTENSE GRAIN DIGITAL SCANS

  • POTIENTAL TO GET CONTACT SHEET PRINT HOWEVER WILL BE ABLE TO EXTRACT A SINGULAR FRAME PRINT WITHOUT DIGITAL INTERVENTION


  • ISO TOO HIGH

  • UNDERDEVELOPED



Arsenal vs Crystal Palace post match |X  Bio- developed in cannabis
Arsenal vs Crystal Palace post match |X Bio- developed in cannabis


In Paulo Friere, ‘‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, Friere argues that ‘The separation of objectivity from subjectivity, the denial of the latter, when analysing reality or acting upon it, is objectivism. On the other hand, the denial of objectivity in analysis or action resulting in a subjectivism which leads to solipsistic positions, denies action itself by denying objective reality.’ (Freire, 1970, 24) An example of this objectivism observed through archival bodies is police mugshots and the implementation of them in missing person cases. ‘Mugshots have their own grammar and often contain identifying signifiers. It can be the measuring stick, a board with a name and number identifying the subject. It might be two photos together : one face on, one a side profile shot. There may be a hint of institutional lighting, prison clothing…sometimes they have none of the above and rely on the caption to elicit that it is a mugshot and not the closely related but the rather more innocent passport style portrait.’ (Lashmar, 2024, 3). Its also one of the few photos you can’t redo, possess, distribute or consent to. ‘For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-investigators’ (Freire, 2017, 79)

To obtain a mugshot, one must be arrested and considered a criminal.

You’ll be forced to sit for a front facing shot, side profile and a copy your fingerprints. 

 Even if the charges are dropped, anyone who comes in contact with that image will subconsciously,  for a minute, consider you a convict. 

In March 2020 at the age of 15, I was arrested for Fraud under false representation .  I had been threatened by Uncs (3)  to take out £11,000 out of someone else bank account using a fake ID.  I had been escorted with a boy,  3 years my senior,  to [REDACTED] BANK. [REDACTED] had made me rehearse not only what I was said, but how I said it, and even pretended to be my boyfriend so I couldn’t signpost that I was in danger.  Rather mockingly, it had been a officer on their lunch break had come to question us about the suspicious and evidently forged ID. They booked me into [REDACTED] Police Station where my fingerprints and mugshots were taken. I was so afraid they’d find something somewhere even though I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong.  

‘The public have learnt the grammar of the mugshot and will understand when a portrait is cropped into a mugshot formal or a passport is used, exactly what the publisher is signifying  (Lashmar, 2024)



The reading of a mugshot is explicitly authoritative, and becomes a material reproduction of ‘Biometric-photographic  information’. When used in a missing persons appeals., it becomes a silent yet violent form of representation that shadows over the reason in which the photograph is being used in the first place.  ‘Not only did prisoners fear the power of the camera, it marked their bodies with a stigma that was more than just symbolic’ (Lashmar, 2024) The early photographic critic Ernest Lacan suggested that such systematic photography of those arrested presupposed the idea of a criminal reoffending and of the habitual offender who is forced to recognise himself in this accusing image (Lashmar, 2024). This violent categorising of bodies is not just contained to the contemporary mugshot and has instead been used historically  as ‘nothing more than research specimens’ (NBC, 2025) in form of daguerrotypes (5) commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard University Biologist. 


Papa Renty and Delia  (Willingham, 2025)

 

In south Carolina are one example of how photography mobilised in supporting in racial categorisation, reducing human being into visual evidence for prejudicial and predetermined ideological claims.  Instead of documenting personhood, the images contribute to the  authoritative structures that maintain a biased objectification. Black subjects become spectacle of this silent violence used to control, surveil and reduce them to ‘nothing more than research specimens’ (Willingham, 2025) Through this lens, the mugshot present Black bodies as sites of observation, classification and evidence whilst denying them agency over their own representation.  



Case study 1 : Mark Duggan the Father / Mark Duggan the Criminal. 


On the 4th of August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot on Ferry Lane, North London as a result to a hard stop by firearm officers who responded to reports.  intelligence reports that he was in possession of a firearm whilst travelling in a taxi on the A503. The operation was overseen by Operation Trident (4) “As the vehicle came to a stop, Duggan opened the rear door, and leapt out. Within seconds, an advancing officer known only by his codename, V53, had fired twice. The first shot passed through Duggan’s arm, and struck a second officer, known as W42, in his underarm radio. The second, fatal shot hit Duggan in his chest.” (Forensic Architecture, 2020) The account of Officer V53 ,the officer whom delivered the shots, Duggan had a gun in his hand which made him believe his life was in danger. Following the shooting, the gun in question, which was found wrapped in a sock  and seven metres away from where Duggan had barely exited the cab, on a patch of grass to which none of the reporting officers claimed to see any throwing motion from Duggan to warrant its placement. The jury came to 8-1 stating the incident was a lawful killing, as Officer V53 acted on the grounds of self defence. The verdict catalysed an uproar of frustration and anger in the Black community resulting in a chain of violent riots starting in Tottenham and engulfing London.


I remember seeing the story in the news, the image they used of him… undeniably he looked like a criminal. A scornful face cropped into  infamous rectangle frame. I remember thinking, if he really was a criminal why were people -  MY PEOPLE rioting?  Why was people crying and angry because ‘things haven’t changed’? 

Why did being Black feel like a crime?  

When I got older, I learnt the image had originally visualised the late Duggan standing at his daughters graveside, holding a heart plaque in her honour. The crop wasn’t formatting issue the newspapers had to get around, it was deliberate.


He was always a criminal in their eyes.   



The reading of the un-cropped image is a stark contrast to the circulated cropped image. Rather than present  Duggan as a  ‘gang member’ , the un-cropped image shows the story of a grieving father whose ‘scornful  face’ is instead realised as a man in mourning. 

  Visibly the cropped image redacts the graveside and accompanying heart plaque held by Mr.Duggan; through its media circulation  the image loses its true documentation of a father grieving his daughter  - leaving a  tightly  framed portrait that  operates through the visual language of a mugshot, encouraging a prejudice reading of him as a convict before the circumstances of his death are ever considered. This significance of this transformation   become apparent given the  ‘the forensic evidence adducted at the inquest casting significant doubt on the account given by V53.’ (R (Duggan) v HM Assistant Deputy Coroner from the Northern District of Greater London, 2017, para. 16). Although the forensic evidences introduces uncertainty into the official account of Duggan’s death,  the disseminated photograph serves a different purpose. Though the removal of context it transforms ambiguity into certainty, encouraging viewers to arrive at a conclusion before engaging with the evidence. The discourse therefore is not whether the photograph is truthful , but what truth it was constructed to communicate. What becomes a proof of a man grieving the loss of his child ; is manipulated to appear as a criminal whose death can be more  easily rationalised. This distinction becomes particularly vital when considering the wider public response to Duggan's death. If, as the inquest suggested, aspects of the official account remained contested, then the circulation of a photograph already coded through the visual language of criminality worked to stabilise a particular interpretation of events. Before the public encountered forensic reports, witness statements or legal proceedings, many had already encountered the image. In this sense, the photograph functioned not as evidence of what happened, but as evidence of who Duggan was presumed to be. Through the framework established by Lashmar, the photograph becomes readable through the grammar of the mugshot despite not being a mugshot itself. The tightly cropped frame, isolated facial expression and removal of contextual information encourage a reading shaped by suspicion rather than empathy. Similar to the daguerreotypes commissioned by Louis Agassiz, the image demonstrates how photography can be mobilised not simply to record Black bodies, but to classify and interpret them through pre-existing structures of power. The photograph therefore participates in a longer history of racialised image production in which Black subjects become sites of observation, categorisation and evidential scrutiny. Through this reading, the significance of the Duggan photograph extends beyond a single media image. It demonstrates how photographic evidence is never neutral and how visibility itself is structured through acts of selection, circulation and omission. The image asks viewers to see a criminal. The un-cropped photograph asks viewers to see a father. The distinct difference in visual articulation reveals the power of photography not merely to document reality, but to construct it. While Duggan's photograph demonstrates how meaning can be imposed through circulation, my darkroom practice turns towards the processes that make photographs possible in the first place. Rather than examining how images are distributed, the following experiments examine how visibility itself is materially produced.


Through missing persons cases, archives, darkroom processes and institutional photography, this chapter has argued that photographic evidence is never neutral. Rather than just existing, visibility is produced through systems that determine whose images circulate, whose stories are amplified and whose disappearances are neglected. 



My darkroom practise emerged as a response to these questions, but most importantly as a lesson to myself. 

On the 2nd of August 2008, 2 days before his seventeenth birthday, Alexander Issachar Sloley left his friend’s house in Edmonton and was never seen again. The news will say he smoked weed, a Class B drug that in, 2026 , with enough money and authorisation is available to buy through your doctors prescription.  The police will use a mugshot of him in appeals that’s visual data becomes the foundation of age-development E-fits, AI enhanced billboard and public appeals that circulate his face across the country whose eyes follow you. 

 When alternative photographs are later supplied, they’ll  still resort to the mugshot, digitally move his eyes to look above.  Yet the reading remains the same: Black boy. Smokes weed. Has a mugshot. The story won’t include that he also suffers with bad acne and may be prone to breaking out or that his biggest crime was that he’d would spray ‘Brut’ cologne all over our sisters stuff. The mugshot doesn’t describe the boy who neighbours, friends, family and school teachers remember as being nothing but respectful, cheeky and loyal.

The mugshot reduces him to a object of surveillance and suspicion, that dissolves the complexity of human life and becoming secondary to the authority of the image itself. 

As a photographer and darkroom practitioner, learning to read images meant learning to recognise the cultural signifiers through which Black bodies are repeatedly interpreted: mugshots, cannabis, balaclavas, weapons. It is one of the reasons I stopped photographing Black men alongside these symbols. I became increasingly conscious  that images do not merely reflect cultural narratives but can actively reproduce them, and in most cases vandalise the significance of them. Seen through this lens, the mugshot operates as another form of colonial branding, one that participates in a longer history of reducing Black subjects to categories that can be observed, managed and controlled.  Like the archival photograph, the  cropped portrait of Mark Duggan, it demonstrates that photographs do not simply record reality but actively participate in its construction.



Throughout this chapter, photographic evidence has been examined through missing person appeals, archival collections, darkroom chemistry and institutional image production. Across each of these sites, the photograph emerges not as a neutral record of truth but as a material object shaped by decisions regarding circulation, preservation, classification and interpretation. What becomes visible is never accidental. Visibility is produced. 

For me, the darkroom became a way of confronting that reality. It became a space to question how images acquire authority, how absences are represented and how Black lives are repeatedly translated through systems that claim objectivity whilst reproducing their own biases. The darkroom did not bring Alex home. It did, however, teach me to read photographs differently.

Perhaps that is what this chapter ultimately asks of its reader. Not simply to look at photographs, but to question the conditions that made them possible. To ask who produced them, who circulated them, who benefits from their reading and whose stories remain outside the frame.

Because sometimes the most important thing in a photograph is not what is visible.

It is what has been deliberately left out and why. 



 


 1. Chemical compounds used in photographic developers as an reducing agents. They are responsible for the reduction process that reveal latent images on film snd photographic paper. Commercial darkroom  developers  are usually a phenol compounds called Hydroquinone, P-Aminophenol and Metol also known as (P-Methlaminophenol sulphate). Phenols are also found in organic compounds that carry aromatic smells. 


2. Grain in this context is referring to the visible silver halides crystal left after analogue film devleopment. Its visibility is dependent on the films base ISO, temperature and exposure to light. Traditionally higher ISO film have finer grain that makes it more 


3. Abbrevation for uncle, although its usage is used as boarder term to describe older men between the ages 25-45. Among fraud groups the term ‘uncs’ is used to describe the main benefactor within the fraudulent transaction.  

4. A controversial, reactive and operational subdivision of the Metropolitan Police Force that investigates focused on firearms and gang related crime. First conceived in the 1998 in response to a large amount of ‘Black on Black’ crime that took place in the London boroughs of Brent and Lambeth.


5. Type of early photograph  produced on chemically treated silver Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839













Bibliography 


Anchell, S.G. and Troop, B. (1998) The Film Developing Cookbook. Boston: Focal Press.

Forensic Architecture (2020) The Killing of Mark Duggan. Published 9 June 2020. Available at: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-mark-duggan (Accessed: 7 June 2026).

Freire, P. (2017) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Modern Classics edn. London: Penguin Books.

Harper, D. (n.d.) Archives. Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: https://www.etymonline.com (Accessed: 1 June 2026).

Hunter, J., Allan, J. and Rickford, R. (2023) The Ethnicity of Missing People: Findings from Police and Local Authority Data, 2021–22. London: Missing People.

Ilford Photo (2003) Processing Your First Black & White Film: A Step-by-Step Guide to Film Processing in Small Tanks for Hobbyists, Students and Schools. Information Leaflet. Mobberley: Ilford Photo.

Lashmar, P. (2014) ‘How to humiliate and shame: A reporter’s guide to the power of the mugshot’, Social Semiotics, 24(1), pp. 56–87.

McKay, P. (2026) ‘The Art of Film Grain’, Analogue Wonderland. Available at: https://analoguewonderland.co.uk/blogs/film-photography-blog/the-art-of-film-grain (Accessed: 7 June 2026).

Missing People (2026) Based on a True Story. YouTube video. Available at: https://youtu.be/ic7FBquYUEg (Accessed: 17 May 2026).

Missing People and ListenUp (2024) ‘We’re told not to make everything about race, but it is about race’: The experiences of Black missing children and their parents. London: Missing People.

R (on the application of Pamela Duggan) v HM Assistant Deputy Coroner for the Northern District of Greater London [2017] EWCA Civ 142. Court of Appeal (Civil Division). Available at: https://www.judiciary.uk (Accessed: 7 June 2026).

Slakoff, D.C. and Fradella, H.F. (2019) ‘Media messages surrounding missing women and girls: The “missing white woman syndrome” and other factors that influence newsworthiness’, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 20(3), pp. 80–102.

Willingham, L. (2025) ‘Harvard agrees to relinquish early photos of enslaved people, ending a long legal battle’, NBC News, 28 May. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com (Accessed: 7 June 2026).

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