Judges perform an important role on behalf of society, as impartial decision-makers, interpreting and applying the law, presiding over courtrooms and ensuring a fair trial. The image of the judge – how they are viewed culturally – reinforces their role, emphasising their authority and neutrality, thus supporting the legitimacy of the court as an institution. Increasingly, judges use video conferencing where either they, or other participants, are located away from the courtroom. Reporting on a three-year empirical study, this paper argues that the introduction of video-conferencing technologies in court has had a profound impact on the production, management and consumption of judicial images, with implications for the role of the judge. Video links challenge cultural assumptions about how the role of the judge is performed and what the image of the judge should be. We argue that greater congruence needs to be achieved over video links between that image and the role of the judge.

Studies exploring the link between the representation of judges, photography and mass media tend to focus on the appearance of cameras in courtrooms and the reproduction of the resulting photographs in the press at the beginning of the twentieth century. But more than fifty years separate these developments from the birth of photography in the late 1830s. This study examines a previously unexplored encounter between the English judiciary and photography that began in the 1860s. The pictures where known as ‘carte de visite’. They were the first type of photographic image capable of being mass produced. It is a form of photography that, for a period of almost twenty years, attracted a frenzy of interest. Drawing upon a number of archives, including the library of Lincoln's Inn, London's National Portrait Gallery and my own personal collection this paper has two objectives. The first is to examine the carte portraits of senior members of the judiciary that were produced during that time. What appears within the frame of this new form of judicial portraiture? Of particular interest is the impact the chemical and technological developments that come together in carte photographs had on what appears within the frame of portraits. The second objective is to examine the manner in which they were displayed. This engages a commonplace of scholarship on portraiture; the location and mode of display shape the meaning of what lies within the frame of the picture. Carte portraits were produced with a particular display in mind: the album. They were to be viewed not in isolation, but as part of an assemblage of portraits. Few albums survive. Those that do offer a rare opportunity to examine the way carte portraits of judges were used and the meanings they generated through their display. Three albums containing carte portraits of judges will be considered.