On 28 June 2022, the right-wing news portal OpIndia shared a leaked image of a police first information report (FIR) (OpIndia 2022a). This image was a mobile phone screenshot of a police station computer terminal. The place of vernacular digital images generated from mobile phones in twenty-firstcentury political events is a key thread in this chapter. The screenshot moves through a media aesthetic landscape: these range from everyday encounters to temporary political events that cluster around internet crowds. Long after events subside, screenshots persist in court records, cloud-based folders, and chat threads.

In the saturated landscape of twenty-first-century media, screenshots form part of a topology of network images. Scholars have argued that a topological sensibility is integral to computational culture, defined by continuity, measurement, and fluidity (Lury et al. 2012). Even as it fosters interconnection, the topological turn is aporetic. Glitches, errors, and leaks mark network topology: this shapes the relations between screenshot images, infrastructures, and political affect. Screenshots are networked still images, which range from digital photos of handwritten bills in bazaars, mobile phone screengrabs, file transfers on platforms, biomedical scans, and still captures of closed-circuit television (CCTV) to bystander video footage that appear in social media platforms and legal evidence. Screenshots gain motion as they circulate in media networks. As they move through engagement algorithms and multiple screens, leaked screenshots gesture towards a larger ecology. When screenshots circulate, we can glimpse the material traces of image capture.