Reading the Police File: Interiority and the Forensic Artefact

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the challenges encountered in pursuing interdisciplinary research into forensic material culture, in particular the forensic photograph. Scholarly research projects which are also geared towards popular curatorial outcomes (public exhibitions, publications, digital media outputs) are subject to complex ethical and methodological considerations. Drawing on his own curatorial experience the author suggests that a major task in researching forensic material culture involves finding the ‘research question’ itself, or even more fundamentally, defining what precisely is the object of study. Arlette Farge delights in the revelations of everyday life offered by the eighteenth-century judicial archive, but what, the essay asks, of the more recent archival police matters, hovering on the cusp of memory and forgetting? In line with Farge’s idea that research may lead to a ‘remaking’ of the archive, the essay narrates the author’s experience of re-rendering, redescribing selected forensic images via the medium of pencil and charcoal drawing. It is suggested that the ‘research question’ and ‘object of study’ might be revealed, at least in part, via the manual acts and labours of such redescription, and the necessary long-term reflection and consideration such labour necessarily entails.

KEYWORDS:

• Forensic photography
• forensic narrative
• police archives
• domestic interiors

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Peter Doyle is an Author, Academic, and Musician, whose books include Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music Recording (Wesleyan, 2005), as well as two collections of forensic photographs, City of Shadows, 2005 and Crooks Like Us, 2009. He researches popular music histories and film sound, has curated major exhibitions on pulp publishing and forensic material cultures. He is the author of four novels, including The Big Whatever (2015). He is the recipient of two Ned Kelly Awards as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an Associate Professor of Media at Macquarie University, Sydney.

Notes

1 Reappearances of forensic materials (especially film, video, and photography) in the art, scholarly, and popular culture spheres, both in Australia and internationally has been surveyed in works by Katherine Biber. (See Biber 2019). The question of how forensic material might be narrated – raising questions of ethics, aesthetics, and affect in the creation of story from court documents and other forensic artefacts – is a central concern of works by Kate Rossmanith. See Rossmanith (2014) and Biber, Doyle, and Rossmanith (2013). See also Rossmanith’s creative nonfiction monograph (2018a) and short documentary film (2018b) (See footnote 2 below).

2 This idea of ‘insideness’ is explored in the documentary Unnatural Deaths (Rossmanith 2018b), which considers the unexpected ways in which bereaved family members view crime scene images, with therapeutic guidance, of their deceased loved ones, and the grief, remorse, and eventual healing that can results from such looking. The sound design and narration, along with the actual (anonymised) police photos, create a charged mise en scene, at once an irreducibly material, quotidian trauma-scape, and equally a haunted internal memory space.