About: caleb
- Full Name
- Caleb Williams
- Website
- http://www.hht.net.au
- Details
- It’s often been remarked that police archives are coercive, bureaucratic, and obsessed with reductive classification. But my own feeling about the Justice & Police Museum forensic photography archive is that it offers its explorer, an unofficial guidebook to life in the past. The archive contains ‘evidence’ that is direct, unapologetic and raw. It shows us many of the things that the official histories leave out. We see a side of Sydney that is both painful and surprising. We get a sense of a morally flawed city of tremendous vitality; and learn about its crimes, passions and follies; about all that can go wrong … fires, burglaries, car-crashes, murders and industrial accidents; we also encounter the suspicious persons, prostitutes and criminals who crowd the police stations of this world: their quirks and idiosyncracies preserved by aesthetically compelling and historically illuminating photography.
The photographs that the Justice & Police Museum forensic photography archive contains fascinate me both for their connection to police work and for their relationship to broader developments in twentieth century visual cultures. Anyone interested in the capacity of photography for intimate, provocative and graphic revelation will, I believe, also be interested in these images.
The exhibition that I am currently researching intends to examine each decade of the archive’s 1912 to 1964 duration and will eventually tour to photography and contemporary art museums overseas.
Posts by caleb:
Next Page »