Abstract

This practice-based research examines the development of the visual culture of British emergency politics between 1997-2017. It cites the first naming and emergence of the British government emergency response committee COBR (Cabinet Office Briefing Room) in 2000 as the beginning of a new condition in the visual culture of emergency politics. This study pinpoints the combination of camera phone images and social media in 2005, with the implementation of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 as a pivotal moment in who can now claim, and counter-claim, the legitimacy of civil emergency events. This study will show how emergency images have now become a set of standardised visual conventions and modes of habitual participation, normalising the condition of a continual state of emergency. This inquiry identifies a new category of images, namely the emergency image and the emergency response image. I argue that the emergency image and emergency response image have not only altered the public perception of emergency events and the State’s response to them, but have opened up a new space for political contestation where the claiming of emergency events is now distributed between the State and the public. This investigation uses a practice-based research methodology to publicly reassemble the COBR Committee by actively collating, curating and documenting its previously siloed visual elements and fragments, and its emergency events between 1997-2017. Four original practice-based research outputs include: Emergency State: The COBR Committee between 1997-2017 held in July 2021, the web archive (www.COBR-Commitee.uk), a formal entry of a dataset of all publicly held COBR meetings between 1997-2017 to the UK Data Archive (dataset ref number: 855344) and an intervention in which images of a restaged COBR meeting are placed within the economy of images.