Conclusions
& Implications

     
If I hope to have shown, or uncovered anything it is that the productions of these images belies linear temporality; they contradict the very idea of a beginning, middle, and an end. It is difficult for me to find a conclusive voice for something that is continuing. There a myriad of images that could be studied just within the parameters of the three subjects glanced, especially since the Trayvon Martin incident has attracted abundant national attention, and has even crept into global newsfeeds. I chose to focus primarily on the (re)presentations of slain youth in this discourse analysis, but there is a wealth of visual texts waiting to be analyzed concerning Officer Schroeder's, Officer Quintana's, and Mr. Zimmerman's (re)presentations. I have further recontextualised Rocha, Sanders II, and Martin, so now, I too, have inserted myself into the sprawling discourses of their second lives. It is not so important to clearly demarcate an inception, middle, and finale (death) of the competing discourses of these individuals' lives, but to identify how their continued presence is an indication of something, not singular and easily definable, but so deeply imbedded in our cultural mores that we may fail to recognize it as ,it continues to (re/de)construct power and knowledge.

     "...History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening. - And no doubt, the astonishment of "that-has-been" will also disappear. It has already disappeared: I am...one of its last witnesses (a witness of the inactual)," and this analysis is its antiquated indication.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1981), 93-94."

                 
                 
                 



Index


Images Cited

"Wanted for Murder"

Mugshot of Officer Quintana

Diagram of Rocha's incident

Skittles protest

"Slick" 2-3

Former A.P.D. Chief Stan Knee

"We are Trayvon Martin"

"Support A.P.D."

Dr. Robert Bednar's image "D. Rocha's Block"

People

Three Sanders

Rocha's mugshot