From the loft
A new blog from the curators of the Justice & Police Museum.
The forensic photography archive within the Justice & Police Museum was originally created by the NSW police between 1912 and 1964 and contains an estimated 130,000 negatives. The archive may be the biggest police photography collection of its type in the southern hemisphere, and offers the standard fare of police investigation: mug shots, accident scenes, crashes, murders, fires, forgeries, fingerprints - images stemming from every imaginable variety of law breaking, and forsaking across six decades of 20th century.
The archive’s photography is powerful and compelling. Sobering, evocative and sinister subjects are captured with astonishing clarity by the medium-format glass plate and flexible negatives that the NSW police forensic cameraman used for much of the century. Images from the archive produced much excitement when seen recently in the City of Shadows book and exhibition and before that, in the Crime Scene exhibition of 1999.
We continue to research the negatives within the archive. Recent discoveries have entered a new exhibition at the museum, Sydney’s Pubs, and are also informing several exciting future projects. This blog will be your chance to hear from all of us who are directly involved in these projects. Thoughts and finds will be presented. Challenges confided, research agendas explained, and some of the photographs that inspire, haunt and astonish us will be revealed!
Warning
Images from the Justice & Police Museum forensic crime photography collection may contain images of deceased persons. The Historic Houses Trust has published these images in good faith with no intention to cause distress or embarrassment to any individual.
