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At various times over the last few months, I’ve been up in the museum loft, with Museum Studies intern Veronica Kooyman, poring over crime scene negatives from the 1950s. As a result of this experience my vision of that decade has been seriously revised. In Australian historiography, the 1950s are portrayed as an optimistic decade of steady employment and rising prosperity … cue grainy newsreel footage of whirring lawnmowers and cheerful nuclear families who have escaped inner city drudgery for the peace and privacy of a brand new bungalow on a leafy tree-lined street.

But as documented by the police, life in the suburbs often turns out to be dysfunctional, threadbare and violent. Photographs of interiors of the period repeatedly expose domestic settings of incredible squalor, dishevelment and clutter. The dingy, bedraggled ‘50s suburban cottage also transpires to be the site of some truly mind-boggling crimes. Their victims are often members of the same family.

At first I felt deep shock at the repeated instances of domestic suicide and murder we were encountering. It seemed as though every packet of negatives from this period contained its own tragic cargo of melancholy aftermaths: corpses in front to of gas ovens, or lying open-mouthed on double beds beside empty poison bottles, or hanging from a rope in a living-room doorway, or slumped in a pool of blood next to a recently discharged rifle.

Now, a month or two on from when we first started to look at this decade in some depth, these images of perpetrators and of victims, of apparently ordinary folks who could not take it anymore and suddenly snapped with terrible consequences for themselves and others have become sadly predictable. As I said at the beginning of this piece, my notion of the 1950s has been thoroughly revised. The ‘50s have lost their innocence for me. A nocturnal melancholy now hovers in the blinding light of a sun dappled lawn, and in the faces of those who occupy the house beyond, “marks of weakness, marks of woe”.

Domestic violence shocks us for a number of understandable reasons. Not least because the home, usually a place of shelter and love, becomes cruelly violated, turned into a site of moral disaster by its touch. And as familiar as I have become with the raw and uncensored evidence of wrongdoing the archive is so full of, I nonetheless continue to be startled whenever I discover an image relating to an assault or homicide in a bedroom. The bedroom normally speaking is a place to shrug off the troubles of the world, to sleep, dream, rest and make love: a setting where our truest, least-guarded, most vulnerable selves desire to dwell in a situation of complete security.

There are few things more ‘loaded’ in their evocation of love gone wrong, or more suggestive of jealousy, rage, and revenge brutally enacted, than the copiously bloodstained sheets and pillowcases of a recently occupied double bed.

If we look closely at the image above, there are traces to be found of the bedroom’s recent inhabitants, a male and female couple. Draped across the metal bed-head several articles of female apparel, underclothes, a ‘slip’, and a zippered dress. While just beyond it, next to the doorway onto the covered verandah, we find a male army uniform – a dangling tunic with corporal’s stripes and a pair of trousers. To the left of the bed, more clothes, and what look’s like a small traveling case.

What has happened here? The image is not dated and lacks documentation. With the true facts yet to be determined, the urge to supply narrative, to surmise and speculate takes hold. It’s the 1940s … wartime Sydney, a soldier comes home … he’s been ‘celebrating’ … perhaps he’s drunk as a skunk … in the privacy of the bedroom with his lover, his wife or his ‘pick-up’ for the night, an argument occurs – it starts off slowly, but mounts in intensity, there’s accusation, blame, justification and retort – a struggle involving a blunt object followed by a hideous explosion, and then finally this: the mutely accusatory aftermath in chilling black and white.

The other day I was alerted to a batch of extraordinary photographs from the 1920s by a member of staff at the museum, named Gareth Malone. It was explained to me that these images had been damaged… all of them suffered from chipped corners, hairline fractures and surface abrasions. When I viewed these offender photographs on my PC screen however, this damage was easy to ignore and other qualities – intimate, non-coercive, jovial and disarmingly relaxed – became apparent.

The portly and self-possessed individual named ‘Saddler’ (shown above) best captures the self-confident, defiant unflappability I discerned in some of these photographs. His ‘body language’ reminded me of that of H. Ellis who graced the cover of the museum’s 2005 book, City of Shadows. The homburg hat, elegant wool-knit tie, cuffed suit pants and brightly polished 10-hole leather boots, suggested a certain amount of slick and knowing (and possibly ill-gotten) affluence. And the facial expression – detached, mildly amused – made light of a dark situation (the middle of an arrest scenario) …

Photographed just left of centre, and framed in a perfect square, Saddler’s chunky proportions dominate this image. Rain has just fallen and the floor of the muster yard where Saddler sits is still wet. The faintly shimmering reflection of the legs of his chair can just be made out. Light flows down from above, and is also fielded up from the wet floor, suffusing the image with a diaphanous softness. The wall’s scratched, flaked, mottled quality adds to the visual interest, making the polished smoothness of Saddler all the more pronounced against the distressed patina of his setting.

Our culture has been extraordinarily successful at screening the reality of ‘death’ from sight. Death still remains something of a taboo subject, and the look the dead possess – despite countless TV and movie depictions – is unfamiliar to most of us.

When I came across a box of morgue photographs from 1918 that lacked documentation, I was both baffled and intrigued. Not by the horror that offered itself up to my gaze as I went through the contents on the light-box, but by the serenity I discovered in the features of many of those portrayed. All of the individuals photographed in this sequence of negatives are male, most are fairly young to middle-aged, a shroud covers each person to the neck and heads rest on a wooden block. I assume the photographs were taken for purposes of identity, coronial inquiry, or criminal investigation. Some photographs reveal cuts and bruises to faces and heads, as if the deceased has suffered a fall, or was involved in a fight with an assailant before death. Other photographs in the box, including the example shown above, reveal no signs of physical trauma whatsoever. Could some of these photographs relate to deaths from natural causes, I wondered? I knew that in 1918 a flu pandemic killed millions around the world, young, old as well as those in the prime of life. The pandemic lasted from March 1918 to June 1920 and effected between 2 and 5 % of the global population. In NSW alone, 6387 lives were lost to the ‘Spanish flu’ in 1919.

Whatever the facts behind the deaths recorded in this box of glass plate negatives, a number of the individuals photographed, seem strangely at peace, as if experiencing a light doze from which they will rouse themselves at any moment. In book descriptions of death I had read of the ‘supreme calm and dignity’ that sometimes marks the faces of the dead. And for the first time, I understood that this was not always sentimental exaggeration or the wishful thinking of the religiously minded.

Sometimes when looking at one of the many intriguing mug-shot photographs in the museum’s forensic photography collection, it is a detail off to the left or right of the main subject, an accidental or spontaneous happening that has unexpectedly entered the frame which grabs your attention. In Camera Lucida cultural theorist Roland Barthes named this phenomenon the ‘punctum’ … a part of the image that is not the intended focus but which nonetheless ‘impacts on’, ‘reverberates with’, ‘pierces’ or ‘wounds’ the viewer. In this photograph it is the casual stance of the detective who has strayed unaware into the focal plane of the camera.

The detective hovers, head bowed, absorbed in the act of winding his fob watch, a step or two distant from the middle-aged offender. The detective’s overt concern with the small ticking mechanism in his hand has a serendipitous, fateful symbolism. Photography is all about ‘time capture’, and being arrested and charged for a crime, leads to ‘doing time’. For M.E. Baker, the photo’s intended subject, physical liberty is perhaps about to be exchanged for the ‘slowed time’ of the prison cell. The casual watch-winding presence of the detective, guardian of law, calibrator of time, suggests all that now hangs in the balance for the rather wan, and weary looking M.E. Baker.

I found this surreal and somber glass plate negative several months ago and immediately set it aside for digital scanning. I discuss some of the thoughts the image provoked below.

1. The discovery of this image triggered a powerful reaction. I felt stunned. There is the illusion of motion in the photograph. The flash creates shadow beneath the body apparently lifting it up off the concrete steps, as if a backwards dive out of life, sleep and dreams has been made.
2. The detectives and the attending crime scene photographer stand back from the victim whose striped pyjamas reveal a dark patch above the waistline – is this blood from a stabbing or gunshot wound? It struck me that the photographer could have stood on the steps, bent over, popped the flash, bathing everything in a luminous cone of light that would have allowed no vestige of evidence to escape.
3. The cameraman has avoided this strategy. The photograph does not allow us to see marks on the body, or blood trails, or footprints or deposits left by the assailant. The decision not go for the ‘close up’ is baffling, because this image is the only one of the murder victim I’ve so far found.
4. From a courtroom/evidence perspective the image makes clear three types of violation – life, nighttime security, and domestic sanctity, all have been shattered by the crime.
5. It also strikes me as an emotional image … “we got out of the car, we came around the corner and we saw that body in these circumstances just there!”. Does the image also contain some of the adrenaline, dread and uncertainty of police work? I think so.
6. The image illustrates – but refuses to explain – a terrible death. Later it will propel the search for motive, identity of the assailant, and the circumstances of the crime.
7. The image reminded me of a still from a surrealist movie. It also recalled the work of night photographers Brandt, Weegee and Brassai. Surrealism’s obsession with bodily contortion, irrationality, violence, and nightmare, hovers as a putative presence. As does the black and white drama of film noir.
8. Perhaps inexcusably I also thought about books and plays. Raymond Chandler called death, “The Big Sleep”. And in Hamlet we get: “… To die, to sleep: To end the thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to … To die, to sleep: perchance to dream:/ Ay, there’s the rub/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”