Seagull Atmospheres
Interspecies Confrontations of the Missing Police Drone Images

“What succeeds where the image is missing?” In this article, Chasseray-Peraldi discusses social media images of confrontations between police drones and seagulls in the context of public demonstrations in recent years in France, and she questions the images missing from these scenes. The examples of animal disturbance allow for a critical analysis of images to investigate missing images from above based on analysis of images taken from below. The aerial scene produces a verticality that is elusive in terms of at least two modalities of otherness: this animal that escapes me and this institution that controls. The scene between the drone, the seagulls and the protesters is a disruptive event that opens up the horizontal axis of transformative encounters.

Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi, rassemblement contre le projet de loi « sécurité globale », place du Président-Édouard-Herriot, Paris, 17 novembre 2020, photographie numérique.

Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi is a teacher-researcher in information and communication sciences at the Sorbonne (GRIPIC) and the Paris College of Art. She is currently working on a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Yves Jeanneret on Google’s digitised landscapes. She recently published “La production standardisée du territoire. De la prise photographique à l’archive en ligne” (Question de communication, 2019) and “Something that disturbs. Encounters between animals and optical machines” (Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, 2020).

Citation: Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi, « Les atmosphères des goélands. Confrontations interspécifiques des images manquantes des drones policiers », Transbordeur. Photographie histoire société, no. 6, 2022, pp. 78-87.

Transbordeur
Annual peer-reviewed journal