CRIME: AUSTRALIA

Here are are some amazing photographs from various Australian archives (there will be a separate post on the amazing portraits from the Sydney Police Archive). I read a great academic (art/media criticism) paper written by a Caleb Williams on an Australian Crime archive. He uses many of classic media theorists, Barthes, Baudrillard, Sontag, Benjamin et. al. to address the archive and best of all there are great pictures. 

"It is about photography as testimony, photography working as a rationally-based evidence collecting activity, but also about each crime scene photograph as a receptacle for catching and commemorating something more; atmospheres that are disturbed and wounded, scenes not of visible horror, but of horror suspected, of horror that has recently happened but is no longer evident."

That element of a "horror that has recently happened but is no longer evident" somehow makes the images that don't contain people (alive or dead) like the car wreck and especially the stairwell seem more morbid than the - literally morbid images - of crime victims. 

CRIME: AMSTERDAM

CRIME SCENE AMSTERDAM
There is a recent trend of combing city crime-photo archives and a great example is this book called Crime Scene Amsterdam. The odd thing is that these look like they could be touchy-feely art school photographs from the last decade or William Eggleston knock-offs. Here are a few samples (via www.archibaldkobayashi.com). 

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."