Photography and Truth

Photography's ability to objectively capture and record images from the natural world was heralded from its earliest invention and reflected in books such as Fox Talbot's 1844 Pencil of Nature. Photography's ability to capture likenesses led, by the 1860s, to their routine admission as legal evidence in American and British courts in cases of forgery, to prove the identities of criminals, and later as pictorial evidence of the scene of the crime.Footnote ⁷ In the 1890s, Alphonse Bertillon at the Parisian Prefecture created standardized systems for photographing criminals and crime scenes, which he exhibited at the 1889 Paris Exhibition and the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Bertillon's systems were enormously influential in the fields of both detective policing and professional photography.Footnote ⁸ The accepted purpose of the crime scene photograph was to record the scene, and the photographs were introduced in court as descriptive evidence, like plans or maps, “accompanied by the testimony of a witness who could testify to their accuracy and authenticity, and who could also be cross-examined.”Footnote ⁹ In this way, photographs could be made to fit existing evidentiary standards. Photography was used in the Anglo-American legal system to preserve, as Elizabeth Edwards describes it, “pure fact without and beyond stylistic convention,”Footnote ¹⁰ informed by the viewer's ability to recognize significant clues. Photography aimed to show the physical nature and position of objects, and to “make images that are uninflected by the process of making the images,” that is, that appeared natural and direct.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly to other scientific uses of photography, crime scene photography “linked the eye to broader scientific systems of knowledge” in which evidence could be preserved and projected into the future.Footnote ¹² The judicial assertion of the jury's a posteriori ability to objectively analyze identification photographs and crime scenes photographs has been reinforced by current research into the cognitive neuroscience of vision, which asserts that the visual recognition of faces and of complex visual scenes is precognitive and intuitive. In a process described in visual advertising as “preattention,” what we see is based on visual inferences that depend on the priors imbedded in the neural circuity of the visual cortex.Footnote ¹³ This visual imagery of crime presented in twentieth-century English courtrooms offered jurors and judges a new sense of accessibility to the crime scene. Just as cheap Victorian pornographic postcards made pornography available to those without the tools of literacy and education, so crime scene photographs allowed those in the courtroom to “read” the photographs in what they saw as a rational and commonsensical way.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet legal photography's claim to truth-telling and objectivity was more an epistemic exercise in police investigative authority than a reflection of its legal or forensic status. While courts ruled that photographs were the product of scientific processes and that they were accurate representations, they also required them to be authenticated by a knowledgeable witness, usually the police photographer. After the First World War, new police photographic departments recruited civilian men already knowledgeable about photography directly into what became a separate stream of police training and promotion in the London Metropolitan Police. As experienced photographers, these men were influenced by contemporary aesthetic currents in documentary photography, film noir, and professional portrait and advertising photography. They had some freedom on how to frame and focus the images and how to arrange the resulting photographs in court exhibition volumes. The subjective nature of photographs was reflected in British legal copyright statutes that protected them from 1862 on, and in a series of court decisions that acknowledged that the emotive and visceral nature of crime scene photographs could be prejudicial to jurors.Footnote ¹⁵ Barristers’ memoirs also suggest that the objective nature of crime scene photographs was contested in court; J. D. Casswell recalled that in his defense of Mrs. Rosina Cornock for the murder of her husband at the Bristol Assizes in 1947, he managed to blunt the “prejudicial” effects of the photographs of Cornock's head by obtaining an admission that the type of film used would make the bruises appear darker than they actually were.Footnote ¹⁶ Crime scene photographs therefore functioned as what Elizabeth Edwards has called “tools of reassurance”; their claim to be informational evidence was largely about asserting the authority of the bureaucratic institutions that produced and archived them.Footnote ¹⁷

The Early Years of Crime Scene Photography: Tarrington, Herefordshire, 1904

The incidental survival of crime scene photographs creates an archive of happenstance. In contrast to fingerprint and identification photographs, which were organized into registers and filed in cabinets for rapid retrieval, only cases in which a suspect was identified and brought to trial led to photographs being printed. Crime scene photographs assumed a judicial spectator; they were printed in multiples and mounted in exhibit albums to be examined first by police detectives, then by the director of public prosecutions, then presented at the committal hearings and seen by the defense counsel, defendant, and the magistrates.Footnote ¹⁸ When the case proceeded to trial, they were viewed by the judge and members of the jury.Footnote ¹⁹

The act of looking at the crime scene photographs took place in a social context that mediated their importance, notably in institutional offices and the courtroom, whose functions were to prosecute crime. Because archived case records for the Assize and Central Criminal Court from this era do not include court transcripts, we can only extrapolate from the pre-trial depositions how they were referred to and used during trials. The photographers’ depositions generally included statements to the effect that “These photographs are produced from the untouched negatives that are in my possession,” linking the negative to the chain of evidence that had to be preserved instead of discussing what had been moved or altered in the room before the photograph had been taken.Footnote ²⁰ Depositions of police officers rarely refer to the photographs, except to note the position of objects or rooms. Likewise, there is little information about the reaction of the jury, judge, or defendant to the photographs. Newspaper reports sometimes make note of a particularly strong emotional reaction on the part of the jury, such as the revulsion of the jury seeing photographs of the dismembered body of Emily Kaye in the murder case against Patrick Mahon at the Lewes Assizes in 1924.Footnote ²¹ Generally, however, the files are silent on the courtroom use of these photographs.

Many of the archived cases that refer to photographs in the exhibitions listings no longer retain them in the file, and most of those that tend to survive in the pre-1960 period are from the Central Criminal Court files, taken by the London Metropolitan Police. These surviving photographs are not representative of the wider incidence of crime in London, especially the gender of victims. While the London Metropolitan Police Registries of Deaths by Violence record almost twice as many adult females as adult males murdered between 1933 and 1953, the proportions represented in the accessible archived crime scene photographs are roughly equal between male and female.Footnote ²² After the 1950s, crime scene photographs are more likely to appear in the Assize and Central Criminal Court files and in their original albums. In borough police forces, individual detectives or photographers sometimes kept their own copies of an exhibition album and later donated them to archives, where they have few contextual documents and remain mostly unidentified.Footnote ²³

The National Archive collection of crime scene photographs is one of the few twentieth-century collections in the world to retain its archival linking to assize and Central Criminal Court depositions and police files. The collection as a whole, and the following sample images, point to the interrelatedness of criminal investigations, technologies, legal practices, and aesthetic context. Crime scene photography developed as an important tool in twentieth-century English police investigations of suspicious deaths and as part of the forensic shift from the laboratory to the crime scene.Footnote ²⁴ Yet the earliest of these photographs were not necessarily forensic outside of their presentation as court exhibits, since they were usually taken by local civilian photographers, and the contents of the images retain a visual opacity in which the significant clues are unclear. In the earliest English deposed photographs, the forensic ideal of a preserved crime scene was not met or even simulated.

The first set of archived interior crime scene photographs in the National Archives collection are from a 1904 case at Sollars Court Farm, Tarrington, Herefordshire.Footnote ²⁵ John Powell, a depressed farmer recovering from influenza, shot and killed his cousin Ada Meek, who owned the farm and lived there with Powell, his wife, and the housekeeper. That morning, the four of them had sat down together for breakfast in the kitchen. While Meek was washing and drying the dishes and Powell was sitting in a chair by the fire, the gun he was holding went off, and Meek was killed. There was no clear motive or family disagreement. Four of the five photographs that accompany the depositions depict from various angles the room where the crime occurred. Although the technology of flash powder, a mixture of magnesium powder and potassium chlorate ignited by hand in a pan to produce bright light explosions, had been in use since the late 1880s, these photographs relied instead on the natural light coming from the window and the open kitchen door to provide enough illumination for the long exposure. The effect is of someone coming from outside, shedding light onto the scene of the crime. The light is focused on the washing-up bowl on a table by the hearth, where, according to the depositions, the shooting had taken place (figure 1). Another photograph shows the chairs rearranged neatly around the table, numbered on the print to show where each person had sat for breakfast an hour before the shooting. Signs of domestic prosperity crowd the background: a lamp, a houseplant, and what appear to be a ham and sides of beef hanging from the ceiling (figure 2).

Figure 1

Sollars Court Farm kitchen, view from window, TNA ASSI 6/39/6.

Figure 2

Sollars Court Farm kitchen, view from door, TNA ASSI 6/39/6.

These photographs illustrate the transitional nature of early crime scene photography in England. The room had been already cleaned, and John Powell had admitted the shooting, and there is no evidentiary reference to the photographs in the depositions.Footnote ²⁶ The outcome of the trial is also unknown, as the Herefordshire indictment records for the autumn of 1904 were destroyed by enemy action in the Second World War.Footnote ²⁷ The table photograph (figure 2) seeks to reconstruct the moments before the crime rather than the aftermath, as well as to suggest the emotions hidden beneath the disrupted domestic routine. As Ross Gibson has argued, while forensic activity is “a cool, slow, and deliberate process of making meaning,” crime scene photographs are suffused with feelings that must be part of their historical interpretation.Footnote ²⁸ These photographs can be seen “not as a series of documents, but as a series of sensory emotional enablers in which the indexical and forensic on the surface of the object are also merely the surfaces of possible meaning.”Footnote ²⁹ The photographs are also transitional in that, rather than a police officer or detective, the photographer was a local man, Frederick Richard Tainton. He was listed in the 1901 census as an “artist: photographic” and was scheduled to testify at the Hereford Assizes.Footnote ³⁰ His photographic technique is visibly influenced by the Pictorialists, the first fully international group of advocates and practitioners of photographic art, who developed a distinctive soft-focus aesthetic to make photos seem more like paintings or drawings.Footnote ³¹ The rural setting of the farmhouse and its old-fashioned kitchen also reflect Pictoralism's typical subject material. Identifying both the contemporary photographic aesthetics and the criminalistic search for clues shows the complex nature of legal evidence as well as the early development of forensic tools.

The photographs also reflect the Herefordshire Constabulary's enthusiastic interest in the legal use of new photographic technology. As Stefan Petrow observed, police photography had by the 1890s become “a useful supplement to personal files, a measure to build confidence, a symbol of efficiency and professionalism … a symbol of a systematic approach to investigating crime and criminals,” even though it had yet to be formally introduced as a police specialization in England.Footnote ³² After the First World War, amateur photographic knowledge began to be consolidated into the larger English police forces by the recruitment of amateur photographers into specialized photographic departments. In 1901, the London Metropolitan Police began a six-month trial in which members of the Fingerprint Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department took photographs themselves rather than hire professionals. In this period, 162 negatives were taken and 996 copies made, at an average cost of one-fourth of the fee charged by professional photographers. The in-house photography “saved time in production and ensured secrecy,” and the excellent results were “owing to PC Deacon's knowledge and economy in the use of the various chemicals and generally to his efficiency as a photographic operator.”Footnote ³³ New equipment for the nascent Photographic Branch had to go through a laborious system of requests and Home Office approvals. In 1905, the Criminal Investigation Department requested funds for the purchase of a seven-inch focus Goerz lens, which cost £7.10. By 1916, the covert photographing of suffragettes required the purchase of a reflex camera, which could be focused in a split second rather than relying on tables to tabulate distance. By 1931, this camera had worn out and was replaced by a Thornton Pickard Ruby Reflex camera. Prints were dried on a line in front of the fire until 1932, when the increasing volume of large prints necessitated the purchase of a commercial photo dryer.

Police Photographic Expansion: Soho Square, 1933

In the 1930s, police photography in England began to expand rapidly, with published guides to current techniques emphasizing its objective forensic and judicial uses. In the 1930s, the courts and the police viewed photographs of crime scenes as similar to drawn plans, with equivalent truth-telling properties. In a chapter on photography in Teignmouth Shore's 1931 collection on crime and its detection, Captain W. J. Hutchinson, chief constable of Worcester, argued for the evidentiary interchangeability of photographs, sketches, and plans, which all provide both impressionist and perspectival information about the crime scene.Footnote ³⁴ A few years later, Metropolitan Police Inspector J. O'Brien, in the 1936 article “Simple Photography for Policemen,” also implied that the truth-telling properties of forensic photographs were not always apparent on the surface and that they should be taken and recorded as taken immediately: “Any attempt to reconstruct a scene must obviously destroy the value of any photographs taken, and it is quite certain that they will not be admitted as evidence.”Footnote ³⁵ The evidentiary value of the photographs was not in what they themselves contained in the frame but rather in their importance as a verifiable document of the scene in the aftermath of a crime.

At the same time, the development of distinctive local visual styles in crime scene photographs points to the importance of wider visual culture. English murder cases in general also developed a specific genre, typified by wide-angle side shots of the room or outdoor scene, and a reticence in depicting details of the body and particularly the face of both male and female victims. Full-body and close-up facial photographs of the victim's body rarely appear until the 1950s, and then only in accompanying morgue photographs. Unlike early American crime scene photographers, English police also tried to keep both spectators and detectives out of the photographic frame. Likewise, while American newspapers published increasingly explicit photographs of crimes and violence in the 1930s and 1940s, in Britain the publication of crime scene photographs remained fairly restrained.Footnote ³⁶ British newspaper photographers were rarely close to the actual scene of crime before the 1960s, and most English newspapers instead printed portrait photographs of murder victims in life. Russell Roberts has shown how the Daily Herald’s editors cropped and enhanced portraits to infuse the images with a new pathos in the context of crime reporting between 1935 and 1962.Footnote ³⁷ English daily newspapers also depicted the outside of houses or areas near where crimes took place as visual illustrations of the type of crime depicted. Detectives or pathologists arriving or leaving the scene of crime were also photographed. In the notorious case of wealthy divorcée Elvira Barney's shooting of her lover Michael Stephen in July 1932, the Daily Mirror featured a photograph of Superintendent Hambrooke of Scotland Yard leaving the house while police photographers and fingerprint experts were at work inside.Footnote ³⁸ In at least one case, a freelance journalist stole a book of exhibition photographs from a counterfeiting trial at the Central Criminal Court, claiming he had found them on the floor, and three of the images were published in the Daily Express on 10 July 1937.Footnote ³⁹ Both he and news editor James Wilson claimed they had not seen the stamp “Central Criminal Court” on the cover of the exhibition album. While English newspapers did not publish graphic crime scene photographs as in America, they recognized that crime sells. As the Carlisle Conservative Newspaper Co. Ltd. told the Royal Commission on the Press in 1947, “Much as we deplore it, the fact remains that the public, as a whole, revels in stories of crime and the more sordid stories of human tragedy.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The amateurism of early crime scene photography was displaced in England and elsewhere by professionalization by the 1930s. Aided by advances in photographic technology and inspired by Bertillon, the practice of institutional crime scene photography developed simultaneously in London, New York, Sydney, Mexico City, and other major centers.Footnote ⁴¹ Technological advances in cameras allowed the introduction of wide angles and a proliferation of images, while separate tracks developed for forensic photography as a field of work. Police photographers developed different tools and aesthetic techniques for specific crimes, such as the use of photographic filters and ultraviolet light to detect forgery, close-up photographs of tool marks in burglary cases, and images of buckets, bandages, and beds in cases of suspected criminal abortion.Footnote ⁴² Crime scene photographers shared technical, aesthetic, and teleological languages, while at the same time developing their own local styles, reflecting the twentieth-century development of global and imperial police relationships identified by Georgina Sinclair and Chris A. Williams.Footnote ⁴³ The international exchange in the genre and form of police photography was made possible by articles in professional publications such as the Police Journal and the Metropolitan Police College Journal, and at conferences such as the International Criminal Police Congress in Monaco in 1914.

For example, New York Police Department photos in the 1910s and 1920s were attributed to several detectives in the Criminal Investigation Department. They used a wide-angle 25 mm lens and, to take overhead shots, a three-legged metal tripod, its legs visible in many of the surviving photos.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Scotland, forensic photography developed as part of criminal and civil investigations carried out through the forensic departments of the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow.Footnote ⁴⁵ John Glaister Sr. and John Glaister Jr., University of Glasgow Forensic Medicine and Public Health regius professors and medico-legal examiners for the Crown from 1898 to 1962, did much to popularize the use of photography in forensic investigation, and their archives include over 300 photographs taken at the scenes of crimes and during post-mortem examinations.Footnote ⁴⁶ As Nick Duvall has argued, forensic photography was a point of intersection between forensic medicine and police practice; many of the photographs shown in court in Scotland were subsequently destined to circulate in other contexts: projected as lantern slides in the Glaisters’ lectures, published in newspapers and as figures in books, and displayed in the Forensic Science Department's museum.Footnote ⁴⁷

The rise in the number of crime scene photographs in the courts in the 1930s mirrored the increasing saturation of visual images in British popular culture: “Advertising hoardings brought images onto the street, the cinema offered hours of visual entertainment, and cheap illustrated publications achieved unprecedentedly large circulation.”Footnote ⁴⁸ These photographs were largely mechanical images in black and white: snapshots, newsreels, newspaper and magazine illustrations, and feature films. Black-and-white photography was strongly associated with documentary truth, order, and classification and was used for scientific research to record evidence in the fields of medicine, botany, and the natural sciences, including anthropology, archeology, sociology, and astronomy.Footnote ⁴⁹ So powerful was the association of black-and-white images with documentary truth that it influenced fine art, such as Picasso's newsreel evocation in Guernica, and Second World War propaganda.Footnote ⁵⁰ Black-and-white photography was also associated with the medium's documentary and truth-telling functions.Footnote ⁵¹ In the Victorian period, photography was seen as objectively recording what was placed in front of it, as “innately and inescapably performing a documentary function.”Footnote ⁵² For instance, in England, the late Victorian photographic survey movement sought to create a photographic record of vanishing churches, cottages, and folk customs for future generations.Footnote ⁵³ As the historical concept of “documentary” photography evolved in the 1930s and 1940s, documentary photographers sought to create photographs that would act “as both conduit and agent of ideology, purveyor of empirical evidence and visual ‘truths.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ London photographers George Davison Reid, Margaret Monck, Wolfgang Suschitzky, Cyril Arapoff, and Bill Brandt used their photographs to comment on the vitality of London street life, including urban poverty and illicit sexuality.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Stephen Brooke has shown in his analysis of the London street photography of Roger Mayne, mid-century documentary photography often used the technique of juxtaposition, such as the movement of children playing against the static lines of streetscapes, or images expressing the dichotomy between social classes.Footnote ⁵⁶

Cinema also provided a visual language of stark morality and emotional tension in the 1930s. By then, there was one cinema seat for every fifteen inhabitants in Britain, with a market second in size only to that of the United States.Footnote ⁵⁷ Popular American gangster films like Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932) depicted a criminal underworld where evil is narrated but ultimately punished.Footnote ⁵⁸ British film noir, pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock, focused more on psychological tension. In his early films, Hitchcock used the camera to mimic characters’ points of view, and close shots and rapid editing to maximize fear, empathy, and anxiety in the viewer. His early films The Lodger (1927), Blackmail (1929), and Sabotage (1936) used London landmarks as integral elements of the suspense.Footnote ⁵⁹ Noir style was more generally associated with unbalanced compositions, low-key lighting, vertiginous angles, night exteriors, extreme deep focus, and a wide-angle lens.Footnote ⁶⁰ Film noir also depended for its locales on tightly concentrated urban spaces, recognizable to police and criminals. Noir scenes, like crime scene photographs, were set in buildings, streets, roadways, landmarks, and passages of all kinds.Footnote ⁶¹ Crime scene photography borrowed from the stark graphic pictorial quality and emotional tension of these cinematic genres, as seen in the tightly framed and high-contrast photograph of the back staircase in Soho Square (figures 3, 4). Black-and-white images were also regarded as more authentic than color photographs, which were associated with advertising and entertainment: travelogues, musicals, cartoons, show cards, calendars, magazine and paperback covers, and billboard advertisements.Footnote ⁶² The portrait photographer Yevonde wrote that although the technology of color film was well advanced by the 1930s, color photographs were not popular: “People had become so used to photographs in black and white that a color photograph seemed to them to be an error in taste.”Footnote ⁶³

Figure 3

Rear of Bellometti's Restaurant, Soho, view from staircase, TNA CN 27/10.

Figure 4

Rear of Bellometti's Restaurant, Soho, view from door, TNA CN 27/10

The forensic aesthetic in England continued to evolve and diversify with the technical advances in photography and the proliferation of police photographic departments. From the 1930s, the 181 separate forces in England and Wales began to develop more specialized professional techniques and departments. Clive Emsley has argued that this shift towards detection and forensics came about partly in response to Home Office pressure and the campaigning of A. L. Dixon's 1930s Departmental Committee on Detective Work for England and Wales, which advocated photography courses for detectives and photographic equipment for both large and small forces.Footnote ⁶⁴ With no formal training except a brief introductory course at Hendon, police photographers had to enter the force as skilled operators and also learn on the job. The development of photography in provincial forces depended on local funding and on the local presence of a forensic science laboratory or other specialized college.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Bradford Technical College, for example, in the 1930s provided research staff and equipment that allowed the Bradford police to use ultraviolet and infrared rays to detect forgery; the Bradford City Police force was the only one in 1936 to regularly use color photography.Footnote ⁶⁶ Likewise, an expanded headquarters for the Manchester City Police Department in 1937 allowed space for the developing and drying equipment necessary for a new Photographic Department, which in 1938 took 1,695 photos and prepared 15,158 prints.Footnote ⁶⁷

In the London Metropolitan Police, the Photographic Branch developed first as part of Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard Headquarters, and then, with an increased workload, moved to C3 as a section of Fingerprint Branch in 1934.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1933, the Photographic Department took 45,522 photographs, and in 1934 the number increased to 70,218.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1934, police photographers recorded 251 crime scenes in London and attended court 322 times. The Photographic Branch developed a separate path of entry and promotion; applicants had to possess “a thorough knowledge of photography” and had to pass a technical exam to advance in rank. Police photographers had to be knowledgeable about contemporary equipment and the various uses, genres, and aesthetics of photography.Footnote ⁷⁰

The surviving archived photographs suggest that photography, while not used in all cases of serious crime in the London Metropolitan area in the 1930s, was used in high-crime neighborhoods such as Soho in C Division. Soho had a reputation for respectable entertainments in theatres, restaurants, and nightclubs, but also for organized and haphazard criminal activities such as illegal gambling clubs, protection rackets, homosexuality, and prostitution.Footnote ⁷¹ For instance, one of the arguments the Metropolitan Police Photographic Branch made for the purchase of a new three-light camera unit in 1934 was that the flash powder previously used had twice set fire to the drapery in the “bohemian rendez-vous” the Caravan Club on Endell Street.Footnote ⁷² In the police raid on the club, Inspector O'Brien of the Photographic Department found it was too crowded to photograph the patrons and so took pictures of the empty interior after they had left.Footnote ⁷³ The police reports describe the outrageous sexual and drunken behavior of male and female patrons, but all of this escaped the camera. Instead, photographs of the exotic and shabby interior had to represent in court the debauchery that had taken place. The contrast between what Judith Walkowitz has described as “the decorous front stages of Soho's food industry and its gritty back region” also emerges in a case featuring Bellomettis’ restaurant in Soho Square in 1933.Footnote ⁷⁴ Varnavas Loizi Antorka, a Cypriot silver washer who had been fired by chef Boleslav Pankowski earlier in the day, returned with a revolver and shot at Pankowski three times as he came down the back staircase of the restaurant.Footnote ⁷⁵ Two of the bullets entered his body, while the third ricocheted off the floor and hit another waiter in the leg. The other waiters overpowered Antorka, took the gun, and handed both over to police. Pankowski survived until the next day in hospital but did not regain consciousness. Two crime scene photographs were taken by the police photographer, likely that evening or the next morning. One depicts the scene looking out from behind the dingy back staircase towards the closed outer door. Nestled behind the trestle table are rubbish bins (figure 3). The bloodstain in the center of the floor is echoed by other stains and the mess of the cans and empty bottles. Another less defined stain in the foreground could be from the injured waiter. The second photograph shows the same scene from the open outer door, from the point of view of Antorka as he would have entered the room (figure 4). Here the eye is drawn to the white tablecloth on the table, which hides the bottles. Its ghostly movement in the current of air from the open door suggests a life that is absent in this cramped, narrow frame.Footnote ⁷⁶ The photographs expose the claustrophobic closeness of the atmosphere, the grim textural detail of the dirt and debris on the floor, and the dark bloodstain. The shabbiness of the scene and the pool of blood correspond to the visual language of urban poverty and crime represented in the drawings in the “yellow press” and publications like the Police Gazette of the late nineteenth century, as well as early documentary photography, which would have been understood by the Central Criminal Court judge and jury to whom they were shown on 27 June 1933.Footnote ⁷⁷ The dramatic framing of the two perspectives on the stairway and the doorway would also have heightened the theatricality of the other evidence and deepened the impact of Antorka's crime.

These crime scene photographs are examples of the institutional framing of one scene as part of wider criminal neighborhood. Like Eugene Atget's mysterious landscapes of Paris at night, “dead-end streets in the outlying neighborhoods [that] constituted the natural theater for violent death, for melodrama,” the crime scene photographs’ image of back stairs squalor aligned the defendant with a criminal class and possibly ethnic type.Footnote ⁷⁸ Like the photographs of the Caravan Club, the depopulated frame suggests the crime scene photograph's ability to go literally behind the scenes to reveal hidden rooms and stories, and to stand metaphorically for the crimes that took place therein. While the photographer used the camera to objectively record the staircase and bloodstain for the judge and jury, his framing and stylistic techniques also reveal links to the visual languages of film noir and the documentary tradition. The bloodstain in the center of both frames unites both the objective search for clues and the decoding of affect in the aftermath of the murder. Antorka was found guilty but recommended to mercy by the jury, as they argued he had not intended to shoot Pankowski when he returned home to change clothes and plead for reinstatement until he saw the revolver in his drawer and decided to bring the gun to scare the chef.Footnote ⁷⁹ Justice Humphreys pronounced the death sentence, against which Antorka unsuccessfully appealed. He was executed at Pentonville Prison on 10 August 1933.Footnote ⁸⁰

Postwar Crime Scene Photography and the Expansion of the Forensic Aesthetic

After the Second World War, the use of crime scene photography expanded to more English police forces as one technique to deal with diminished police manpower after the war. For example, in 1939, the London Metropolitan Police Force numbered 19,500 men. By the end of the war this number had dropped to 12,000, and even with recruiting drives the total strength of the force remained abysmally low at 14,000 in 1946.Footnote ⁸¹ Fewer men and a shifting population led the Metropolitan Police to develop new investigative techniques, with increased training in specimen collection and the re-establishment of the Hendon Police Laboratory in New Scotland Yard Headquarters at Westminster in 1948.Footnote ⁸²

Postwar suspicious death investigations highlight the effects of psychological trauma, austerity, and migration in the larger atmosphere of exhaustion, anxiety, and difficult adjustment to peacetime life. The best practices of forensic photography extended to including more types of cases, more stringent techniques, and the application of new technological advances. In 1948, Jack Augustus Radley, a forensic document examiner, published the first book solely on the topic of photography in crime detection, including material on microphotography and photography using ultraviolet radiation and infrared.Footnote ⁸³ The book also set out a more stringent view of how the crime scene of a murder should be photographed, including views of the scene itself, points of entry and exit, any traces of the crime, and the point of view of any witnesses.Footnote ⁸⁴ While Radley argued that “no police officer would attempt to dogmatise on what should and what should not be photographed in a murder case,” other postwar lectures, courses, and seminars offered in the United States and Britain sought to do just that.Footnote ⁸⁵ New editions of forensic textbooks also suggested how the practices of police photography were evolving. First published in Sweden in 1949, Crime Detection: Modern Methods of Criminal Investigation by Chief Superintendent Arne Svensson of the Criminal Investigation Department Laboratory in Stockholm and Superintendent Otto Wendel discussed the best ways in which science and technology could be used in support of the police. In the 1955 English edition, the authors gave instructions for a photographic process that applied “a systematic scrutiny from all angles.” For instance, “A house where the murder has been committed will generally be photographed from the outside to show the roadway, garden, outside doors and outhouses” to illustrate how the felon gained entry and exit.Footnote ⁸⁶

North Ilford, 1952

After the war, the archived crime photographs of the Metropolitan London Police included more scenes of suburban crime, expanding the pre-war focus on urban poverty. Wartime photojournalism, heavily censored, had emphasized the mutual bonds and affection of the family, including the sleeping shelterers in London tube stations captured by Bill Brandt for the Ministry of Information, family embraces at railway stations distributed to newspapers through agencies like Topical Press, Keystone Press, or Fox Press, and similar photojournalist essays for Picture Post.Footnote ⁸⁷ This turn away from modernism to more traditional themes was mirrored in the larger visual culture of the 1940s and 1950s. While wartime film shortages and paper rationing had meant a constriction of advertising, the postwar birth of a new consumer culture led to a shift marked in London in 1951 by the Festival of Britain and by the International Advertising Conference, with thirty-eight national participants.Footnote ⁸⁸ To sell goods in an increasingly saturated market after 1954, advertisers turned to photographic naturalism, the use of human drama, and the expanding use of color.Footnote ⁸⁹ They were aided by large libraries of stock photographs that catered to magazines, newspapers, and other foci of middle-class taste and included popular images of babies, children, animals, families, and domestic scenes.Footnote ⁹⁰ The expansion of this type of advertising photography in the 1950s was also part of the emergence of new cultures of consumer capitalism in an age of postwar affluence.Footnote ⁹¹ Likewise, the increasing affordability of the personal camera meant that by the end of the war amateur photography was commonplace, with more families able to photograph themselves and collect and display their photographs. Annebella Pollen has argued for the complex personal significance and social value of family albums and mass photography; this focus on images of the family and the home also forms a backdrop for crime scene photography.Footnote ⁹² Advertising and amateur images of the happy family are the implicit foil to the scenes of domestic murder captured in postwar crime scene photography.

The crime scene photographs in next example were taken in a North London suburb in 1952. They disrupt the familiar postwar image of home and family: a tidy front garden with carefully set flowers and lace curtains at the window has a dead body crumpled face-down on the lawn (figure 5). Three uncollected newspapers and the open door hint at the disruptions in the household that led up to this moment. As Alexa Neale's research has shown, crime scene photographs present a perversion of the established genre of the domestic.Footnote ⁹³ Thomas and Elizabeth Hodges had been unhappily married at 74 Elgin Road, Seven Kings in Ilford, Northeast London.Footnote ⁹⁴ Elizabeth had been having an affair with fellow teacher Bill Moore and was on the point of leaving Thomas. On Friday, 8 September, Thomas had gone to Beachy Head to commit suicide, leaving a letter for Elizabeth. Finding that he could not go through with it, he returned to convince her to stay but found her suitcase packed and by the door and Bill on the way over. Thomas put a chopper knife under his coat, and when Bill arrived in the front garden, stabbed him in the head. The crime scene photograph captured the aftermath: the murdered lover lying in the flower bed and dirt scuffed onto the path (figure 6). After the police were called, Thomas went inside to sit on the bottom of the steps, saying, “I wouldn't have done it if he hadn't walked out with my wife and a suitcase.”Footnote ⁹⁵ As the story unfolded, the ideal middle-class domestic front suggested by the neat front garden continued to unravel. When the couple married in 1947, Elizabeth was pregnant with an American sailor's child, whom Thomas treated as his own. He was a manager at the Commonwealth Bank, where he had been embezzling funds to buy his wife gifts to regain her affection. He had tried to win the money back by gambling but failed. The body in the tidy flower beds visually narrated the implosion of three middle-class milieus: home, marriage, and career, bringing the forensic aesthetic to a respectable suburban neighborhood. Perhaps because of his attempts to preserve his marriage in the face of his wife's infidelity, Hodges was found guilty at the Central Criminal Court of manslaughter instead of murder and sentenced to seven years in prison.Footnote ⁹⁶

Figure 5

74 Elgin Road, Ilford, view from door, TNA CRIM 1/2248.

Figure 6

74 Elgin Road, Ilford, view from street, TNA CRIM 1/2248.

Crime scene photography, like advertising photography, invested the home and the human face and form with emotional significance, but in mirror image to signify loss and disruption. The police photographer, according to the contemporary conventions, has also been careful to show the victim's body turned away from the camera so as not to show his face. This reticence to display the face or nude body of male or female victims at the scene of the crime was, after the 1950s, undermined by the courtroom exhibition of a book of mortuary photographs. These images showed the unclothed body of the victim during the postmortem, with a visual emphasis on the wounds that led to death, and one of the images showed the body of Bill Moore.Footnote ⁹⁷ The contrast between reticence and scientific openness reflected long-held beliefs about the acceptable motives and arenas for displaying the naked human body; as Philippa Levine observes, “Unclothedness for properly aesthetic or for neutrally scientific ends is permissible and even to be encouraged, while pornography is an undesirable and a dangerous category.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In the 1950s, public reticence around showing bodies and crime scenes began to shift in the wake of the discovery of the serial murders of John Reginald Christie at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Dale, London. Frank Mort has shown how crime scene photographs taken by Chief Inspector Percy Law from Scotland Yard's Photographic Department, documenting the discovery of six female bodies in Christie's flat and back garden, were seized upon by print journalists as a powerful new visual language of crime. Images of the bodies found in the house were published in daily newspapers as part of a new style of aggressive reporting, in articles titled “House of Death,” “House of Murder,” and “Garden of Death.”Footnote ⁹⁹

Bridgewater Canal, 1958

The 1953 Rillington Place murders heralded a change in English press coverage that gave the crime scene new forensic and journalistic visibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The increasing emphasis on the visual depiction of crime meant that the demands of police photographic departments continued to increase. In 1957, the Photographic Section of the London Metropolitan Police visited 588 scenes of crime compared to 425 in 1956, and more students were attending fingerprinting and photography courses.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The branch now had twenty-three cameras, but only five were useful for crime scenes and often on loan, so that “on several occasions the photographing of the scene of the crime had to be deferred until the following day through lack of a suitable camera.”Footnote ¹⁰² The number of photographs taken at each scene increased, and the types of photographs also changed, as reflected in forensic textbooks. In the revised 1965 American edition of Svensson and Wendel's book, now titled Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation, the authors set out a much more elaborate process of crime scene photography, in which photographs were taken from the inside out but arranged for the courts “in a series which illustrate[s] the events of a crime in a logical sequence,” showing “the overall village, the way to the house, detailed views of the scene, and evidence and the escape path.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The increasingly intricate and narrative focus of crime scene photography was reflected in changes in how the photographs were seen and archived.

Surviving English exhibition albums in murder trials by the 1950s were longer and often multiple. For example, in cases of manslaughter by abortion, the earliest archived photographs of that decade show only the empty rooms where suspected abortions had taken place. But by the mid 1960s, exhibits included photographs of every room in the flat of the suspected abortionist, as well as full-length nude photographs of the victims, often with close-ups of their faces and, in at least one case, of the fetus.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such photographs, unconnected to forensic evidence, derived their evidentiary impact from the depiction of the vulnerable face and bodies of the young women. Photographic conventions shifted in infanticide cases in this period as well. The Infanticide Acts of 1922 and 1938 had reduced the offense of a mother convicted of killing her infant from murder to manslaughter if the “balance of her mind was disturbed.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In order to prove that the mother had killed her child, photographs from infanticide cases from the 1930s and 1940s almost always depicted wounds on the infant body. By the 1950s, the photographic frame was widened to include the setting in which the infant had died. In the 1958 case of twenty-seven-year-old Mary Bracken, who had jumped into the Bridgwater Canal at Sale in Cheshire with her seven-week-old son John, the exhibition album was arranged to show the trajectory of her journey, with two photographs of the canal path down which she walked (figure 7). The photographer stood on a hill focusing on a long view of the path and river; this vantage point unites the graveyard in the left of the frame with the path and the river on the right. The following photograph focuses more narrowly on the fence seen from above in the previous photograph, showing the empty perambulator by a gap in the boards and the edge of the canal where Mary was rescued but John drowned (figure 8).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This evocative photograph compresses the loss of the child into one image: the empty perambulator facing the viewer, the gap in the wall, and the wide river behind. The image is elegiac, haunting, and beautiful. It reflects the compassion shown to Mary by her husband, who detailed their former happiness and her increasing illness, and ended his deposition with the assertion, “I am prepared to stand by my wife.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The policeman who arrested Mary and charged her with infanticide and attempted suicide (the latter charge was dropped) also noted, “I have found this family to be of the very highest quality, and the accused comes from good stock, I have met the husband quite frequently and he has done all he could in this particular case.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Because of the family's respectability and support, because she had pleaded guilty, and because of the clear evidence of mental illness, Mary was found guilty but released into the care of her husband.

Figure 7

Bridgwater Canal, view from hill, TNA ASSI 84/242.

Figure 8

Bridgwater Canal, view from path, TNA ASSI 84/242.

These particularly poignant crime scene photographs reflect a wider shift in postwar landscape photography. While nineteenth-century photographs of landscape were primarily topographical, as in the work of Roger Fenton or Francis Firth, Bill Brandt's postwar landscapes, taken between 1945 and 1950 and published in Lilliput, Harper's Bazaar, and Picture Post and collected as Literary Britain in 1951, were the first twentieth-century landscapes to imbue the land with an elegiac sense of loss amidst natural beauty.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Brandt was more concerned with feelings evoked in landscapes of 1940s than an accurate record of the view; this emotional resonance would be echoed in the later landscape photographs of Ingrid Pollard, Eric de Maré, and John Davies.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the final crime scene photograph in this set, the pastoral river scene is depopulated, empty, and saturated with a sense of loss.Footnote ¹¹¹ The focus on the bleak landscape evokes an emotional response of compassion for the mother as well as the child. This image in particular illustrates that crime scene photographs, like the museum photographic collections discussed by Elizabeth Edwards, should be read not only as “a series of documents but as a series of sensory emotional enablers in which the indexical and forensic on the surface of the object are also merely the surfaces of possible meaning.”Footnote ¹¹² Our observations and attempts to decode them emphasize their doubled nature and our ambivalent position as witnesses. As Julia Adeney Thomas noted about the postwar work of Japanese photographer Ihei Kimura, looking at these photographs demands a dual consciousness, as “one not only sees the objects in the frame but also grasps oneself as the bearer of sight, the witness not only of the image but of oneself as a witness.”Footnote ¹¹³ For historians of crime and forensics, this self-reflexive witnessing emphasizes our inability to definitively solve the inherent mysteries in the study of historical crime, while at the same time it encourages us to keep looking.