ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to understand what is forensic about forensic photographs and what else they might contain. It examines the effects of exhibiting police photography in the cultural sphere, exposing the aesthetic and affective attributes of evidentiary photographs and the personal lives captured within them. Described as "the cultural afterlife of evidence," it is dominated by mugshots and crime scene photographs, but also includes other surviving evidence from the criminal process, which can now be found in galleries, museums, high-end publications and online. Whereas Sante is the narrator publicly associated with the New York City Police Department photographs, the person most closely associated with the Forensic Photography Archive in Sydney is Peter Doyle, who has curated exhibitions and produced books drawn from the Archive. Only partially surveyed and not fully catalogued, this "dark archive" is now in the early stages of digitization. In the New York Municipal Archive and the Forensic Photography Archive, this is made manifest.
