With Speed Graphic Cameras, Art is a Crime [Scene]

In a great city such as New York there are collections of artifacts and boneyards of information everywhere. Among these are dissertations that will never be read, codes that will never be deciphered, objects whose particular import will never be understood, and the traces of innumerable human beings lost to history once and for all, without monuments or descendants or living memory, just a name somewhere in an official record consulted rarely if at all. – Luc Sante

“Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914- 1918″, by Luc Sante

Detection and the policeLuc Sante is to nonfiction literature what Jim Jarmusch is to film or Anthony Boudain is to food: a cool New Yorker that inexplicably gets cooler as he gets older.

“Low Life“, his account of turn-of-the-century prostitutes, thieves, and toughs in Alphabet City is on the bookshelf of every literate five boroughs resident, but “Evidence,” his collection of progressive era NYPD crime scene photos, is what I like to look at on a stormy night.

Researching “Low Life,” an archivist asked if he’d be interested in inspecting the police department photo collection. “Nothing in the reams of photographic documentation I’d sorted through — countless inert pictures of buildings, posed ranks of functionaries, fuzzy views of empty streets devoid of detail — had prepared me for this. Here was a true record of the texture and grain of lost New York, laid bare by the circumstances of murder. Lives stopped by razor or bullet were frozen by a flash of powder, the lens according these lives lives their properties — their petticoats and button shoes and calenders and cuspidors and beer bottles and wallpaper. The paintings were not just detailed documents, either, but astonishing works in their medium. I thought I had come accross the traces of a forgotten master, who seemed to prefigure the pitiless flashlit realism of Weegee while having affinities to Eugene Atget’s passionate documentary lyricism. A style seemed to announce itself, deliberate and inimitable.”

He presents these photos as rare glimpses into people’s daily lives. No one straightened up their house for company or put on a fresh tie for the camera. But the old-timeyness of the victims creates a distance. “These pictures taken so long ago that the people in them would not be dead even if they had enjoyed long and untroubled lives, exist in an eternal present that preserves their subjects between extinction and decay. The ones without bodies in them–nearly all of these are uncaptioned–are just as ominous, even viewed separately. Taken together, they become stills from a film, a nightmare ride from room to room in the small hours: the working day of a professional witness or fingerprinter of corpses, perhaps, but without the protective cynicism of such a trade…There is a mystery here which is only partly accounted for by the period clothes and the wide-angle lens and the flash powder. If photographs are supposed to freeze time, these crystalize what is already frozen, the aftermath of violence, like a voice-print of a scream. If photographs extend life, in memory and imagination, these extend death, not as a permanent condition the way tombstones do, but as a stage, an active moment of inactivity.”

But, as Roland Barthes has said, every photograph is about death. What makes Luc Sante’s book standout from an entire genre of early crime scene photography books is not just his insightful analysis, but the years in which these photographs take place. In 1914, Speed graphic cameras (or press cameras, what Weegee used in the 30s and 40s) were in use for only two years, and most police departments couldn’t afford them. Sante writes about thinking all the photographs were the work of a “single artist,” but it was “not so much the style as the method” that made them seem cohesive. The actual equipment is believe to be a Bird’s Eye, with a high caliber wide-angle lens (just under a fish eye lens.) There was likely only one camera for the department, shared among several photographers, and the labor of pulling a coat over one’s head for outdoor shots, changing plates, and other cumbersome tasks related to early camera equipment created. Ironically the limits to one’s creativity is what gives these photographs such a striking point-of-view. “Their ‘style’ is only the result of conditions combined to cram the maximum amount of information into the frame: the most inclusive lens short of hallucinatory distortion, the most intense lighting, the most comprehensive framing and coverage of the subject.”

But the appeal of vintage crime photography books reflect just as much on contemporary aesthetics. There is Ashley Hope, who paints imaginary crime scenes. Fashion spreads routinely use it as a gimmick, Melanie Pullen has made a name for herself doing just that and a particularly ridiculous episode of America’s Next Top Model, proved that feminists are indeed humorless or the fashion industry is vacuous or both things at once. There’s even a trendy Lower East Side bar with yellow police tape on the ground.

But I don’t believe the “crime scene” as Hitchcockian camp dilutes the power of the raw images. One of my favorite photographs is by Enrique Metinides, an untitled work of a woman hiding her face in her elbow with the body of a dead young man beside her. They are both dressed in colorful, youthful clothes. He took thousands of photos of gruesome scenes in Mexico City, and while one is tempted to contemn them as exploitative without looking at them, it is impossible not to grasp the humanity and sensitivity of his vision when staring at the photography. Remarking on a show in London, Adrian Searle explains:

In effect, he shows us the city and its people, not just the random and cataclysmic event, but also its effect. He shows us, too, the inexplicable.Which is not to say in any way that Metinides’s photographs are lacking in humanity. Quite the opposite. They are overflowing with humanity. In fact, that is the real trouble with them – they show us too much humanity. In Metinides’s images, we don’t just see the body dragged out of the water after the drowning, we see the drowned man underwater, the grey corpse hovering at the bottom of the swimming pool. Or a body being dragged to the bank of a river, like some awful bait trawled at the end of a rope, the spectators on the far bank an inverted frieze reflected in the muddy water.We see things we feel we shouldn’t be looking at, but it is hard to drag our eyes away.

Last year a Dutch photography gallery had an exhibit of police photography, explaining that during the years 1965 – 1986, real art photographers were employed by the forensics department. A debate over the merit of the show went exactly as one might expect. And interestingly, if slightly off topic, The Frick Collection opens its doors for NYPD for “visual observation training” — to teach them how to observe all of their surroundings when investigating a crime scene.

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Posted by Joanne on Mar. 14, 2008 Tagged: , , ,

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