The Archive Gallery
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The Justice & Police Museum's photography space, The Archive Gallery, will present a display of selected images from the Museum’s archive of forensic negatives. The archive was originally created by the New South Wales Police between 1912 and 1964 and contains an estimated 130,000 negatives. It may be the biggest police photography archive 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 spanning six decades of the 20th century. Offering a new exhibition every six months, the space is dedicated to sharing our exploration of this museum’s almost inexhaustible photography archive.
More examples of photographs from the archives can be accessed via the Historic Houses Trust's Picture Collection.
Current exhibition
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Saturday 19 March — Sunday 14 October, 2012
The car crashes and traffic accidents of Sydney‘s past are revealed through compelling photographs from the Justice & Police Museum‘s archive. The motor car emerged as an essential form of personal transport in the 1920s and increasingly police were called to investigate traffic-related offences. Visit the exhibition page
Past exhibitions
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Saturday 8 May 2010 – Sunday 13 March 2011
The work of retired 1950s police crime-scene photographer, Walter Tuchin, is now on display within the Archive Gallery of the Justice & Police Museum. Tuchin’s photographs, taken on behalf of the Scientific Investigation Bureau, between 1952 and1957, document a variety of criminal investigations and accident scenes. Subjects, range from the banal to the shocking: we encounter stolen cutlery, the crumpled bonnet of a car, the hands of a strangler, and domestic murder in a backyard. Each photograph is evenly illuminated, meticulously detailed and carefully composed. This emphasis on clarity was required by the detectives in charge of the case and by the judge in the courtroom. Yet, despite the surety of his method, Tuchin’s photography, at least for the modern viewer, also seems to be charged with something else – a quality that is haunting and surreal. Visit the exhibition page.
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8 August 2009 — 7 March 2010
In the 1920s Sydney police began selectively photographing individuals they thought were, or were likely to become, professional criminals. These remarkable images, which police called ‘special photographs’, came to light after recent research by Sydney author Peter Doyle into the museum’s Forensic Photography Archive. Visit the exhibition page
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7 March — 26 July 2009
By 1952 up to 20 crime or accident scenes might have to be photographed in a single shift. The work produced hourly confrontations with cruel sights and hard realities: each of these ruptures in the orderly life of the town, needed to be recorded meticulously, visually mapped, with a rational gaze and steady hand. This was a time when forensic photography in Sydney underwent a decisive transformation. Visit the exhibition page
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