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Bodies in the Bed: English Crime Scene Photographs as Documentary Images

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Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850

Part of the book series: Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice ((PHPPJ))

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Abstract

This chapter argues that crime scene photographs from London in the 1930s combined new ideals of forensic objectivity with the emotions evoked by signs of violence and disrupted domestic interiors. Through the comparison of a set of crime scene photographs in the National Archives (DPP 2/136) to a set of interior photographs of a flat in Stepney taken by photographer Humphrey Spender, we can see how both sets of images of rooms in which criminal acts had occurred used emotive photographic techniques such as juxtaposition, oblique lighting and tight framing. Crime scene photography, like documentary photography, sought to use the camera to reveal hidden emotional and forensic clues and to emphasize the contrast between the visible traces of criminality and the ordinariness of their setting.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    J. Grierson, ‘Flaherty’s Poetic Moana’, New York Sun, 8 February 1926, reprinted in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Documentary Tradition, 2nd ed., New York: Norton, 1979, pp. 5–6.

  2. 2.

    H. Spender, ‘Lensman’: Photographs 1932–52, London: Chatto and Windus, 1987.

  3. 3.

    The National Archives, Kew, [TNA], DPP 2/136, DPP 2/1441.

  4. 4.

    See E. Edwards, ‘Photographic uncertainties: Between evidence and reassurance’, History and Anthropology 2006, 25(2): 171–188; P. Prodger, Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; J. Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013; A. Thomas, Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science, Oxford: Yale University Press, 1997.

  5. 5.

    A. Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 170.

  6. 6.

    E. Edwards, ‘Photography and the material performance of the past’, History and Theory, 2009, 48(4): 130–150.

  7. 7.

    V. Williams and S. Bright, How We Are: Photographing Britain from the 1840s to the Present, London: Tate, 2007, p. 15.

  8. 8.

    G. Mitman and K. Wilder (eds.), Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, pp. 45–64.

  9. 9.

    J. Mullens, ‘On the applications of photography in India’, Journal of the Photographic Society of Bengal, 1857, 2: 33–38, p. 34.

  10. 10.

    R.S. Carter, ‘“Ocular proof”: Photographs as legal evidence’, Archivaria, 2010, 69: 23–47, p. 24.

  11. 11.

    J. Mnookin, ‘The image of truth: Photographic evidence and the power of analogy’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 1998, 10(1): 1–74.

  12. 12.

    J. Ellenbogen, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002; S.A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

  13. 13.

    TNA, MEPO 2/5938; J.A. Radley, Photography in Crime Detection, London: Chapman and Hall, 1948; W.T. Shore (ed.), Crime and Its Detection, London: The Gresham Publishing Company Ltd., 1931.

  14. 14.

    TNA, MEPO 2/2187.

  15. 15.

    TNA, MEPO 3/1997.

  16. 16.

    ‘Manchester Police photographer retires’, Manchester Evening News, 5 August 1980, 8; B. Broady and D. Tetlow, Law and Order in Manchester, Stroud: The History Press, 1985.

  17. 17.

    M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

  18. 18.

    L.Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

  19. 19.

    H. Wilkinson, ‘“The New Heraldry”: Stock photography, visual literacy, and advertising in 1930s Britain’, Journal of Design History, 1997, 10(1): 23–38, p. 27.

  20. 20.

    M.W. Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002, p. 280.

  21. 21.

    Grierson, Documentary, p. 179.

  22. 22.

    J.B. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, p. 27; T. Miller, ‘Documentary/Modernism: Convergence and complementarity in the 1930s’, Modernism/Modernity, 2002, 9(2): 226–241, p. 226.

  23. 23.

    H. Spender, Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, J. Mulford (ed.), Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1982, p. 16.

  24. 24.

    S. Brooke, ‘Revisiting Southam Street: Class, generation, gender, and race in the photography of Roger Mayne’, Journal of British Studies, 2014, 53(2): 453–496.

  25. 25.

    T. Phu and E.H. Brown (eds.), Feeling Photography, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 350.

  26. 26.

    H. Spender, Interview at his home 29th March 2000. The National Life Story Collection, British Library, C466/101/09 F8796B Transcript, p. 13.

  27. 27.

    Spender, ‘Interview’; ‘Sir William Clarke Hall; An appreciation’, Probation Journal, January 1933, 211.

  28. 28.

    Spender, Worktown, p. 17.

  29. 29.

    M. Carter, ‘Unseen Observer’, The Telegraph, 6 December 1997, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4711138/Unseen-observer.html, Accessed 14 June 2014.

  30. 30.

    H. Spender, Humanist Landscapes: Photo-documents 1932–42, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

  31. 31.

    Spender, Worktown, p. 9.

  32. 32.

    C. Scott, Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson, London: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

  33. 33.

    S. O’Hagan, ‘The way we were: Mass observation at the Photographers’ Gallery’, The Observer, 21 July 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jul/21/mass-observation-photographers-gallery

  34. 34.

    TNA, DPP 2/136.

  35. 35.

    TNA, DPP 2/136.

  36. 36.

    TNA, MEPO series.

  37. 37.

    A. Bell, ‘Crime scene photography in England 1903–1980’, Journal of British Studies, 2018, 57(1): 53–78.

  38. 38.

    TNA, ASSI 6/39.

  39. 39.

    TNA, CB 27/10.

  40. 40.

    TNA, MEPO 3/1696.

  41. 41.

    TNA, CRIM 1/1384.

  42. 42.

    TNA, MEPO 3/1716.

  43. 43.

    TNA, CRIM 1/659, MEPO 3/1691, and CRIM 1/3052.

  44. 44.

    TNA, DPP 2/1441.

  45. 45.

    Miller, Documentary/Modernism, p. 228.

  46. 46.

    S. Dell, ‘Forward from Wigan Pier’: Remaking documentary photography in the 1930s’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2018, 19(2): 168–188.

  47. 47.

    Martin Conboy, Journalism in Britain: A Historical Introduction, London: Sage, 2010, p. 82.

  48. 48.

    Conboy, Journalism, p. 83.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    L. Nead, ‘Visual cultures of the courtroom: Reflections on history, law and the image’, Visual Culture in Britain, 2002, 3(2): 119–141, p. 135.

  51. 51.

    H. Cudlipp, Publish and be Damned: The Astonishing Story of the ‘Daily Mirror’, London: A. Dakers, 1953, p. 51; J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting, and New Media in Britain, 6th ed., London: Routledge, 2003, p. 53.

  52. 52.

    Spender, Lensman, 14.

  53. 53.

    Dell, Wigan Pier, pp. 175, 179.

  54. 54.

    M. Hallett, The Real Story of Picture Post, Birmingham: The ARTide Press, 1994, p. 4.

  55. 55.

    Ibid.

  56. 56.

    R. Kee, The Picture Post Album, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989; C. Gorrara, ‘What the liberator saw: British war photography, picture post and the Normandy campaign’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 2016, 9(4): 303–318; G. Jordan, Down the Bay: Picture Post, Humanist Photography and Images of 1950s Cardiff, Cardiff: Butetown History and Arts Centre, 2001.

  57. 57.

    Hallett, Picture Post, p. 11.

  58. 58.

    Williams and Bright, How We Are, p. 205.

  59. 59.

    J. Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 55.

  60. 60.

    A.K.R. Kiralfy, The English Legal System, 4th ed., London: Sweet and Williams, 1967, p. 158.

  61. 61.

    A. Svensson and O. Wendel, Techniques of Crime Scene Investigation, 4th ed., London: Elsevier, 1965, pp. 30–31.

  62. 62.

    J. Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, p. 170. See also S. Brooke, ‘War and the nude: The photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, 2006, 45(1): 118–138.

  63. 63.

    P. Hendrickson, ‘The color of memory’, in D. Aaronson (ed.), Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939–43, New York: Harry Abrams, 2004.

  64. 64.

    P. Geimer, ‘The colors of evidence: Picturing the past in photography and film’, in G. Mitman and K. Wilder (eds.), Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, pp. 45–64, 45.

  65. 65.

    TNA, HO 287/271.

  66. 66.

    J.D. Casswell, Only Five Were Hanged, London, Corgi, 1964, p. 238.

  67. 67.

    TNA, J 299/55.

  68. 68.

    TNA, MEPO 2/10369.

Archives

The National Archives

Manchester Police Museum and Archive

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    Google Scholar 

  • Spender, H., Humanist Landscapes: Photo-documents 1932–42, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

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  1. Huron University College, London, ON, Canada

    Amy Helen Bell

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  1. Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

    Alison Adam

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Bell, A.H. (2020). Bodies in the Bed: English Crime Scene Photographs as Documentary Images. In: Adam, A. (eds) Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850. Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28837-2_2

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