CRIME: RANDOLPHE A. REISS

There was an interesting show last year at the Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland of archival crime scene photographs called "The Scene of the Crime: Rodolphe A. Reiss (1875–1929)." In 1909 Reiss founded the first academic forensic science program the "Institut de Police Scientifique" (Institute of Forensic Science) at the University of Lausanne. Reiss was a bit of a Sherlock Holmes character - a multitalented, curious man; a chemist, a publicist, a professor, a criminologist and a forensic scientist. An interesting photographic side note is that he was commissioned by the Serbian government to carry out an inquiry into atrocities committed by Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria during World War I. As a result of the inquiry he found photographic evidence in the form of propaganda postcards showing the Austrian-Hungarian Army committing atrocities against Serbs. 

There's some interesting rabble-rousing on the part of the forensic science blog about the show: "...as forensic scientists who regularly use photographs to document crime scenes, autopsy findings and bone trauma to name a few, we are shocked at the use of post-mortem photographs for entertainment." They make an a sharp distinction between forensic and memorial or post-mortem photography. "The practice of photographing death as any other social event like weddings, baptisms and birthdays was very popular. Photographing the recently deceased is also known as Memorial Photography or Postmortem Photography and was a common practice in the nineteenth century."