ABSTRACT
The state's understanding of "plain view" provides a useful heuristic into the ways in which police work to administer a one-way, top down "right to look". This chapter takes aim at policing's controlled and approved images in order to develop an optic that apprehends the violence left in plain view. It aims to understand the trophy shot and police image as contested terrain and a site where particular understandings of police and state power unfold. The trophy shot is a visual self-representation (subject appears with object) of accomplishment and/or possession. Recognition of the objective violence of policing's controlled and approved images, in no way implies a neat delineation in the violence of the image, or that images can be read only one way. Trophy shots that feature a human body, what John Tagg might call an "unwilling subject" bring the violent tangle of the police image into sharper relief.
