ABSTRACT
A subject under wide discussion in the art world is that photographs once made in order to function as documents may take different paths, due to the continuous transformation of the photographic medium. Firstly, performing the archive has been a common practice amongst curators and artists alike during the last decade; the archive is no longer treated as a repository of documents but as a living body-a tendency that has been described, among others, as “archive fever”1 or “archival impulse.”2 In addition, the decontextualization of information has been a major aspect of the postmodern condition and, in the case of photographs, this procedure becomes even more effortless due to their reproducibility. As a result of the aforementioned practices, the museum and the photo gallery often become the new context for a series of documents which comprised, or were a part of, an archive formerly not accessible to the public. Interestingly enough, not even the content of a hermetically sealed police archive can escape this fate nowadays; in the course of the last decade, the police photo archive, which contains, among other subjects, a certain amount of visualized crime, violence and death, has formed a source of inspiration for curators and has found subsequently its place on the art gallery’s white walls.
