From the loft

Arianne Martin, Publicity Assistant with the Historic Houses Trust, recently interviewed Caleb Williams and Holly Schulte, the curators of a new Archive Gallery show presenting the work of retired police photographer, Walter Tuchin.

Arianne: This exhibition is the first time the museum has focused on the work of a single crime scene photographer, as opposed to a group of them. How did it come about?

Caleb: Holly and I met and conducted a filmed interview with Wal, a still spritely 86 year-old, about 12 months ago, and suggested the idea of an exhibition to him then …  Wal, is one of the few still-living photographers from that era. His insights and stories are invaluable to us, in terms of conveying how this work was done, and the photographs he took are, as you can see, completely remarkable. So the exhibition became an opportunity to explore Wal’s practice as a police photographer and various crime scenes, car crashes and investigations he documented.

Holly: There is something very distinctive about Wal’s photography. His images are well balanced and technically strong, haunting and surreal. When you look at the photographs it is often difficult to see immediately how they relate to crime but that is part of their mystery.

Arianne: There are 34 photographs in the exhibition …  there are photos of domestic interiors, stolen goods, the aftermaths of fires, and of course bodies in situ. It seems that Wal’s work (as a police photographer) could be both varied and challenging, was that the case?

Holly: Yes, definitely! We tried to highlight the scenes and circumstances Wal would have been confronted with in the course of an average day. He told us of the need to have a loaded camera at the ready, day and night. There was no way to foresee what sort of assignments would come his way. He had to live with unpredictability, each day was a venture into the unknown.

Arianne: I noticed some of the photographs depict very serious subject matter and some are, well, almost ordinary and undramatic and without knowing the full story, you’d be hard pressed to say how they were connected to crime … ?

Caleb: That’s true. Wal was the consummate professional when it came to the craft of photography. Some images seem are grave and tragic, while others are almost humourous, or simply odd.  There are also images that, despite their police context, have the appearance of fine-art photos … We wanted to bring out some of these conjunctions,  particularly in that powerful grouping  of 10 framed photos, against the deep blue wall …

Arianne: Ah, yes, I really liked the use of colour in the room …

Caleb: Wall’s approach was pragmatic.  His work was to document ‘evidence’. Whether he was photographing stolen goods dumped on a footpath or the hands of a strangler who’d just confessed to killing his wife, the same careful sense of composition, framing and lighting is applied. Wal cared about the plight of victims. He is a very compassionate man. But for the purposes of collecting evidence for court use, the foulest murder and least important theft seem to be documented and presented with same precision and seriousness.  This accounts for that sometimes surreal quality Holly mentioned earlier, when the images are seen together.

Arianne: It’s a fascinating selection you’ve come up with for this exhibition. Was it hard to connect the stories that lay behind these crime scenes to the photographs you wanted to use in the display?

Holly: It’s always a challenge. But the research part of what we do is fascinating! Our process involved scouring the archive to find every photo Wal  took between 1952-1957. We examined the envelopes these negatives were stored in for notes about each investigation. These notes sometimes lead us on to information in Police Gazettes or to a newspaper article. Occasionally, such as in the case of the Joey Manners shooting (Manners was a well known stand-over man, underworld player and thug) we located a thick murder file that held details of witness statements and the trial proceedings. It usually came down to the type of crime that was photographed, if the perpetrator was caught, and how deeply the press covered the case.

Arianne: It’s a great exhibition, well done guys! One last question: has Wal been in to see it yet?

Caleb: Yes, he dropped in a couple of weeks ago and was both overwhelmed and delighted. He had no idea that when he created these images half a century ago – for a short term functional purpose of documenting crimes and accidents – that they would wind up in the gallery of a public museum.

Holly: Working with Wal to do this show was a wonderful experience for both of us. It gave us both a deeper insight into the human and professional qualities required by those who do this important but difficult work on behalf of the community.

The exhibition will be on display at the museum’s Archive Gallery until 13 Mach 2011.