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.

Current exhibition

Crooks

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 Crooks exhibition page

Past exhibitions

exposure

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 exposure exhibition page