Negative epiphanies: revisiting the forensic photograph archive

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This article surveys the emergence into public circulation of the archival police photograph – crime scene, mugshot, accident scene, evidence photograph, and so on – since circa 1990. It narrates the author’s own involvements with a large forensic archive in the early 2000s, describing the uncertainties of method, purpose and of theoretical framing which attended the process. While the material surveyed and eventually exhibited/published was often highly emotionally ‘charged’, that charge was typically obscure, ambiguous or contradictory, and beset by ethical and aesthetic complexities. Beset too by more basic ontological questions, particularly in regard to defining the ‘object’ (whether to focus on the type, the series or the exemplary individual image, for example). Other classification questions and ambiguities – art object or historical artefact? – are discussed in regard to the primary thematic of emotions and the law, enquiring in particular as to how these formerly expressly operational, procedure-bound legal/policing artefacts – old forensic photographs – might be productively ushered back into cultural spheres.