Around 1990,
several tons of negatives were saved from a flooded police warehouse in
Lidcombe, a suburb of Western Sydney. Later on, a curator at the Justice &
Police Museum and author of crime stories, Peter Doyle, was about to sort them
out. For three years he studied hundreds of thousands of prints and arranged
them in chronological order, reconstructed the stories of the people shown in
them and searched for the names of the photographers. The mug shots of Sydney’s
thieves, frauds, prostitutes, murderers, drug traffickers, procurers, fences or
gamblers were taken in the years 1912 to 1948. The mystery around the mug shots
that will never be solved is the photographers’ identity. No one knows who the
police photographs of 1912-1930 were taken by. Perhaps there was only one
photographer, or maybe more. Only some of the prints taken
after 1940 were found in their original packaging marked with the date and name
of the author. The original
mug shots were printed on glass plates sized 4 x 5 inches and 5 x 7 inches, each with an
inscription above the photographed person’s head. The inscription consisted of
the first initial, last name, print number and sometimes an additional comment,
as in the case of Thomas Bede: “this man refused to open his eyes”. The Lidcombe
photographs were first exhibited in November 2005 at the Justice
& PoliceMuseum
in Sydney. The
exhibition was entitled “City of Shadows:
inner city crime & mayhem, 1912-1948”, and it was organised by the Museum’s
curators Peter Doyle and Caleb Williams. The show closed in February 2007. The mug shots
reached Poland
in a story in the new edition of a photography magazine Pozytyw. 16 prints were featured in the pilot issue of the magazine dealing with the problem
of identity. The
exhibition at Yours Gallery features 33 portraits. Yours Gallery’s “City
of Shadows” is not
an account of “inner city crime and mayhem” but a story of the people behind
the crimes.
NSW Police Forensic Photography Archive, Justice & PoliceMuseum, Historic Houses Trust of NSW Reproduced with permission www.hht.net.au
Mug - Shots
Currently in Yours Gallery
I Floor: Adam Pańczuk, curator Maja Kaszkur, 29.01.10-07.03.10
