This dissertation examines the emergence of photography and film as tools of evidence within the American criminal justice system in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and asks how this use of the camera has shaped our imagination of photographic media’s broader epistemological claims. While photography’s evidentiary potential was apparent from the earliest days of the medium, so too was its potential to deceive. Photographic meaning was rogue. This project takes up both images of rogues and the roguishness of images to understand why visual evidence so often fails to operate as expected. The unreliability of photographic evidence spurred further inquiry into the image itself in hope that better tools and closer scrutiny could pin down more authoritative meaning. This belief that there was more to the image than met the naked eye, what I call a “forensic imaginary,” gave rise to a host of would-be experts who imposed competing interpretations of an image now viewed as evidence. However, rather than stabilizing meaning, these inquiries atomized it, proliferating new details ripe for interpretation and deepening doubt in the trustworthiness of visual evidence. Reconstructing these debates through the archival traces that they have left—in trial transcripts, camera lucida tracings, patents, short stories, and fictional films—I show how attention to these rogue images can profoundly reshape a broader understanding of the meaning of photographic media into the digital age.