Evidence obtained by law enforcement agencies during raids on illegal brothels and sex clubs in Ukraine, and published in open sources Raided, the new book from Ditto, is a continuation of the effort of anonymous artist Counterfuture (who has a background in international law enforcement and investigation) to explore visual material that does not come out of the artistic field. The source material for Raided is operational photography and footage produced by Ukrainian law enforcement agencies and published in open sources. They are uploaded on the agencies’ social media accounts for everyone to see. The viewer is invited to participate in a forceful invasion of a work space, following (often masked) authority into a tightly controlled realm as they violently break down doors to enter brothels and strip clubs and arresting alleged criminals and confiscating evidence with little respect for artistic considerations of photography and less so for the privacy of its subjects (whose faces have been blurred in this publication). An institutional ritual is being played out in real life consolidating the dominant position of the law. The operational materials presented in this publication served a functional purpose. They were produced as a bureaucratic service to a judicial system and as documents and objective records of activities and situations that pertain to alleged crimes scenes. In Raided, the chronology of events is deliberately altered by stripping the images of its spatial and temporal context in order to ask questions about the current state of state-society relations, about media, about the voyeuristic depiction of uncertainty, vulnerability and fear in order to research the visual language that is being used by authority to communicate with its subjects and the visual legacy left behind. What can operational visual material tell us about human relationships? What do you really see when looking at the images? Is the truth captured as intended? What are the facts the material conveys? What is it proof of? What do we learn about the situation? How much of this is staged? Who are you rooting for? Where does your sympathy go? Did authority achieve its aim with their publication? Does reproducing this material reinforce the intrusion committed? What is the role of visual material as a witness? How does it shape our notions of the relationship between image and reality? What is the relationship between the act of looking and that of thinking critically about images?
