“Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”
Benjamin clearly posits granting expression and rights on opposing sides of organizing masses. Claim of giving an expression to people, people as an abstract construction, old way the fascist mentality function, as a mean to aestheticise the political life. What is the alternative? For Benjamin this is doing the contrary and politicising the aesthetical. Aesthetical is or in Benjamin’s terminology, perspective, is a very politicised vision which successfully hides the political.
There is something else about these images of the judges here. The use of head shots inevitably resembles mug shots and carries with it a sense of condemnation. Criminal mug shots share the same period of invention and a similar aesthetic with the anthropological use of photography for colonial expeditions. In both examples, the camera resembles a gun pointed at the absolute other, opening an inescapable gap between the viewer and the subject, an inescapable and constitutive difference that is supposed to create 'us and them'. Another example of anesthetisation of the political, where the gap between the colonial people and imperial overlords, criminals and law-abiding citizens, this time become enemies and the people.
Finally, projects concerned with social diagnosis and control, hitched to the discourse of scientific positivism and the colonial enterprise, created the new photographic genre that Sekula calls 'instrumental realism' (1981: 16, 1989: 344), manifested in state security and police archives as well as in psychiatric and anthropological photography (Pinney 1992) of psychological or cultural 'others'!