|
March 21, 2011
In Public eye, private eye: Sydney police mug shots, 1912-1930 in Journal of Media Arts Culture ---Vol 2 Number 3 entitled Shadows of the Dead: Mediating the Archive Photograph Peter Doyle analysis the photos in the NSW police archive. This Forensic Photography Archive can be accessed through the Historic Houses Collection.
NSW Police Dept, Drugs Bureau, Frederick Schmelz, 1930
Doyle says that all these mug shots — whether taken in prison or the police cell — are the product of a state surveillance project, and were certainly not intended at the time to be publicly exhibited. And in the case of the prison photographs we see little evidence of any complicity in the photographic process. He adds:
Many previous studies of photography, including archival photography, have privileged the voyeurism, surveillance and control implicit in the photographic process. As a result, the selfhood of the photographed subject has often been elided. My analysis here explores those aspects of display or expression of selfhood apparent in the subjects brought before the police photographer.
They are different to the standard mug shot because they are rich in the contingent and ephemeral. We see cigarette butts and discarded newspapers on the floor, graffiti on the cell wall, stitch marks and repairs evident in the subjects’ clothing, minor scars and blemishes on their skin.
|
