Captured: Portraits of Crime 1870-1930 - Flipbook - Page 15
INTRODUCTION
term. Proponents argued that photographic portraits ‘served
as part of the offender’s biography and as a mechanism to
extract as much information from them as possible after
apprehension’. Such debates, as Jäger explains, subsided
by about 1870. Photography had become more affordable and
accessible, and photographic portraiture was no longer
considered the domain of the upper classes. Policing and
judicial structures had also changed. There were new,
independent agencies with responsibility for law and order.
Local constabularies were faced with greater numbers of
mobile and unknown offenders, which made preventing crime and
detecting criminals using modern scientific and professional
methods increasingly important. Systems to register and
identify criminals became necessary and ‘portrait photographs
provided a means of recording and detection in tune with
emerging modern methods of policing’. The ideal of the
un-retouched portrait, en face and en profile developed.
These changes paralleled the introduction of photographic
prisoner portraits in NSW gaols, and they provide the starting
point for State Archives and Records NSW’s exhibition,
Captured: Portraits of Crime.
Captured: Portraits of Crime, engages with State Archives
and Records NSW’s collection of Gaol Photographic Description
Books. It commences with Harold Maclean’s recommendation
in 1870 to introduce prisoner portraits and ends sixty years
later in 1930, when the practice was just one in a suite of
criminal identification methods. The series of Gaol
Photographic Description Books exist as bound (and unbound)
volumes, made up of pages that contain the personal
description, ‘particulars of convictions’ and portraits of
men, women and children incarcerated in NSW gaols. This set
of Gaol Photographic Description Books contains the records
of 46,000 individual prisoners. Over time, however, the
records have become increasingly fragile, a situation which
led State Archives and Records NSW to declare them ‘at risk’
in 2016. All 46,000 records were digitised and this process
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