Caleb Williams – Head Curator of the Justice & Police Museum
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.
Nerida Campbell – Assistant Curator, Justice & Police Museum
My special interest is criminal women and at the moment I am focusing on women from the Female Penitentiary at Long Bay in New South Wales. These images begin around 1915 and continue through to 1930. With the help of a band of loyal volunteers I trace the stories of the women who appear in the mug shots using police records, media reports and any other sources I can find.
The images can be both captivating and frustrating. The women’s faces and costumes draw you in and set off a train of musing about how and why they came to be in prison. Often the answer is found in police documents and I return to the image with a new insight. Sometimes my feelings towards the subject have hardened as I read of the litany of misery she has caused, other times I feel a deep sympathy. It is very hard to adhere to the historian’s mantra of impartiality when faced with such intimate portraits and detail of the subject’s life. Sometimes a striking image has been orphaned; cut off from all official and non-official records the story behind the photo can no longer be found leaving my curiosity frustrated and thwarted. All this research will feed into a section of the Museum’s next exhibition Femme Fatale: the female criminal which opens in November 2008.
Holly Schulte – Assistant Curator, Photography, Justice & Police Museum
In late 2006 I joined the museum as Assistant Curator – Photography. My role is designed to facilitate historical exploration, preservation and improved access to a vast and largely unexplored collection of negatives. Created between 1912 and 1964 the NSW Police Forensic Photography Collection contains images that subsume every variety of police work; from crime scenes, fires and traffic accidents, to offender portraits, fingerprints and hand-writing analysis, to photography of internal police activities, including boxing matches, detectives and marching bands. A large part of the earliest negatives also depict prison mug shots from across New South Wales. Viewing this material on the light box is the first stage in a layered process of research that deepens our knowledge of how these images worked as a vital resource for the police and prison departments. Documents, inventories and files that may have once guided the explorer across the terrain of the archive were lost long ago, although some clues do remain. Valuable handwritten notes on brown paper envelopes, or information that has been carefully inscribed into a negative emulsion provide initial sketchy details of crimes and personalities. Over time each piece of this vast puzzle, said to comprise 130,000 negatives, is being assessed, assembled, understood, unearthed, repackaged, scanned and investigated to reveal a fascinating history of crimes, people and places, accidents and tragedies.
Ross Gibson – ACCIDENT MUSIC
I am a writer and audio-visual artist with a long-running devotion to Sydney. After working on projects at the Museum of Sydney in the mid-1990s, I began investigating the forensic photos in the Loft. From the first day, I was mesmerised. I knew immediately that I wanted to work with the collection over an extended period of time.
If you go fossicking in the archive for long enough — say for a dozen years, as I have done — you accrue thousands of feasible but contestable stories concerning the everyday spaces of your life, and you begin to feel quick rushes of emotion pulsing between you and your city. This is how ACCIDENT MUSIC has come about. It is just one of a dozen artworks and installations that have arisen from my research in the archive. These projects are all part of a suite known collectively as ‘Life After Wartime’ which have been produced since 1998, mainly in collaboration with Kate Richards.
ACCIDENT MUSIC is simple enough. I make a weekly post concerning a town you know well. In this town sunrise hustles fresh air in from the ocean, a day spent near the harbour gives the full history of radiance, and at night you can hear accident music in fog horns and pilot bells.
Every Sunday night I will select a new image and supply three breath-short captions or ‘mutant haikus’ that evoke some qualities in the picture. Week by week a mesh of images and texts builds up and gathers the city I love.
Peter Doyle – Author
Subject: Peter Doyle. Middle-aged white male. Works (rarely) as a bar-useful, taxi driver, author of pulp crime novels, “researcher” and university lecturer. A native of Sydney. Was respectably brought up but wasted his youth reading spy novels and penny dreadfuls. Gravitates naturally to bad companions, and is sometimes seen in dives frequented by beatniks. Unconfirmed reports assert that he is a fair-to-middling slide and steel guitar player. Has won the Ned Kelly Crime Fiction Award twice (the subject of a continuing Fraud Squad investigation). Has been known to pose as a musicologist, a saw-doctor, a shoddy dropper and practitioner of “bloodless surgery”. Since 2001 has fostered an association with the Justice & Police Museum, whose gullible staff he apparently persuaded to allow him to “curate” two exhibitions (“Crimes of Passion” and “City of Shadows”). He has authored two major publications in connection with that museum: City of Shadows (2005, with Caleb Williams) and Crooks Like Us (2009). Continues to show an unhealthy interest in archives and material culture, from which he apparently “gets his kicks”. In short, an unregenerate thimblerigger and quacksalver who will stop at nothing to further his nefarious enterprises. No visible marks or scars.