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Crime Scene Photography

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Very interesting. Thanks for posting.
 
Thank you
 
In the early 80s I saw a Bertillon chair in a belgian police station.

I wonder when these chairs were phased-out.
 
Kodak had a publication on crime scene photography featuring IR and UV imaging among other methods.

PE
 
AgX said:
Weegee was not a crime scene photographer in the meaning of that article, which is about forensic photography.
Click to expand...

Perhaps correct, However, do you doubt that "Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian-records-clerk-turned-pioneering-criminologist who is now largely regarded as the father of forensic photography"....was excited in some non-scientific way, or that his police associatesk were excited in some non-scientific way...perhaps akin to Weegee?
 
WeeGee took crime scene photographs to earn money, not to solve crimes.
 
jtk said:
... do you doubt that "Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian-records-clerk-turned-pioneering-criminologist who is now largely regarded as the father of forensic photography"....was excited in some non-scientific way, or that his police associatesk were excited in some non-scientific way...perhaps akin to Weegee?
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Hard to say. All, the investigators, forensic photographers and tabloid photographers, likely got some routine to all that misery.
Weegee's aim and view was to show the bizarreness of the whole situation, including all participants, the other's was to gather/document facts related to a death. That likely effects how one is affected.
 
Interesting in this context is the case of the former Swiss police officer Arnold Odermatt. As amateur photographer and officer from the mid-50s on he made photographs of the car accidents he was called for. For evidence use, with his private camera and at first even against the order of his superior who wanted sketches instead. Long after his retirement those photoghraphs were disvovered by his son and and published at the art world. Meanwhile they are sought after.
But he does not show corpses.
 
AgX said:
Interesting in this context is the case of the former Swiss police officer Arnold Odermatt. As amateur photographer and officer from the mid-50s on he made photographs of the car accidents he was called for. For evidence use, with his private camera and at first even against the order of his superior who wanted sketches instead. Long after his retirement those photoghraphs were disvovered by his son and and published at the art world. Meanwhile they are sought after.
But he does not show corpses.
Click to expand...

Interesting distinction between intentions.

Is intention important ... how is cold forensic work, done for police department money different from Weegee's work, done for public thrills and newspaper money?
 
The difference is the perspective they have on their subjects. And even the subject itself; Weegee for instance included the whole neighbourhood as subject. Though not himself, as far as I know.
 
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jtk said:
Interesting distinction between intentions.

Is intention important ... how is cold forensic work, done for police department money different from Weegee's work, done for public thrills and newspaper money?
Click to expand...

Forensic work is done to solve crimes; WeeGee's work was to provide an income. Not exactly rocket science to discern the difference.
 
Sirius Glass said:
WeeGee took crime scene photographs to earn money, not to solve crimes.
Click to expand...
There's a famous story about Weegee's photo of a slain mafiosi boss. I think it was Carmine Galante. There he was dead next to a table where he was eating lunch outside, blood gushing out with a cigar still in his mouth. They claim Weegee, who was a prolific cigar smoker, stuck one of his stogies in Carmine's mouth for effect. It seemed to work.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/...ted-mafia-leader-carmine-news-photo/515180638
 
Alan Edward Klein said:
There's a famous story about Weegee's photo of a slain mafiosi boss. I think it was Carmine Galante. There he was dead next to a table where he was eating lunch outside, blood gushing out with a cigar still in his mouth. They claim Weegee, who was a prolific cigar smoker, stuck one of his stogies in Carmine's mouth for effect. It seemed to work.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/...ted-mafia-leader-carmine-news-photo/515180638
Click to expand...

WeeGee did manipulate the crimes scenes sometimes, by his own admission, so I would not be surprised it your statement is true.
 
Our photo units in the AF took all base crime and accident scenes involving military in the area. I've seen more than my share of ugly photos.

PE
 
Speaking as a former forensic chemist who responded to crime scenes to collect evidence but not take pictures.... Photos are taken today to document where items were when they were at the scene. The point is to show the eventual jury how things looked and where the evidence was found. The only scene photos that might get used to solve a crime are those of blood spatter (notice there's no "L" in spatter) - and those need to be taken in a very precise way so that the angle of impact of the drops can be calculated. In my 15 years at the MA lab, I had probably less than 10 scenes where the spatter actually became important (I responded to around 50 per year). I wasn't supposed to take photos at scenes because I was a civilian chemist, not a trooper but there were several times I wished I could just grab the camera from them and do it myself. Yes, I've got LOTS of stories - I just can't put them online.
 
My old Mamiya RB67 was originally a crime scene camera. It bears discretely engraved QP prefixed numbers; QP being an inventory designation for the Queensland Police Service. This camera captured numerous ghastly scenes but it appears entirely unharmed by the experience. Here there has been a fundamental change in crime scene photographs as presented in a court of law.

In the "old" days the photographic print shown to a jury had to be physically linked to a particular negative, in turn to a particular camera, time, and place. Legal council could demand that these links be proved before the crime scene picture could be admitted as evidence.

Now that the system has gone digital the question of physical links has been put aside. All that is required to authenticate a crime picture is that some breathing and conscious human being has to get into the witness box and swear "Yep, that's the way it was." The crime scene picture has passed in substance from being evidence to becoming mere testimony.

One could conjecture that the distinction between evidence and testimony, if you want to make it, is inherent in the deep divide between photography and digital picture-making.
 
Important in this context is that a jury trial is not applied in all legal systems. Here such was abandoned in 1924.
 
Maris said:
Now that the system has gone digital the question of physical links has been put aside. All that is required to authenticate a crime picture is that some breathing and conscious human being has to get into the witness box and swear "Yep, that's the way it was." The crime scene picture has passed in substance from being evidence to becoming mere testimony.
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Maris:
Photographs in Canadian law (and British law before that) have always been considered as demonstrative, rather than direct evidence.
They have always required confirmation from people who could testify to their accuracy as representations of reality.
The only exceptions were those photographs that revealed what people could not or did not naturally observe. Photographs like micro-photography and automatic surveillance or traffic cameras.
Those latter types of photographs did require testimony that corroborated the fact that they had not been manipulated.
The analogue photography process helps supply that corroboration, but it doesn't definitively establish it.
The strength of photography, when it comes to evidence, lies in its persuasive and revelatory abilities. Choice of an analogue workflow helps corroborate the accuracy of the results, but it doesn't legally establish them.
There are some exceptions prescribed by statute. They tend to be related to things like microfilm copies of historical records.
 
winger said:
Speaking as a former forensic chemist who responded to crime scenes to collect evidence but not take pictures.... Photos are taken today to document where items were when they were at the scene. The point is to show the eventual jury how things looked and where the evidence was found. The only scene photos that might get used to solve a crime are those of blood spatter (notice there's no "L" in spatter) - and those need to be taken in a very precise way so that the angle of impact of the drops can be calculated. In my 15 years at the MA lab, I had probably less than 10 scenes where the spatter actually became important (I responded to around 50 per year). I wasn't supposed to take photos at scenes because I was a civilian chemist, not a trooper but there were several times I wished I could just grab the camera from them and do it myself. Yes, I've got LOTS of stories - I just can't put them online.
Click to expand...

Yes. Those forensic stories, like Weegee's. like todays obsessive "CSI" stories, and like the reason we're on this thread, are far more important than any purported "crime solving".
 
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