ABSTRACT
The Forensic Photography Archive is a collection of 130,000 negatives made by or for the New South Wales Police Force in Sydney, Australia, between 1910 and 1964. The photographs in the Archive are violent, humiliating, distinctive, disturbing, banal, beautiful, surprising and often inexplicable. Most of them are on fragile glass plates or flexible negatives. The Forensic Photography Archive (‘FPA’, or ‘the Archive’) is stored at Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum, in an old colonial courthouse beside the harbour quays. Its custodian is Sydney Living Museums (SLM), a state heritage agency that oversees a group of museums and historic houses in and around Sydney. This chapter seeks to understand what remains of these images in their afterlife, after the forensic processes have concluded. It examines the effects of using police photography in the cultural sphere, exposing the aesthetic and affective attributes of evidentiary photographs and the personal lives captured within them.
