Don't shoot to miss! Crime in Antwerp in photographs (1930 – 1960), FOMU, 2005.
Murder, manslaughter, rape, grievous bodily harm, attempted murder, suicide, sabotage, smuggling, robbery, theft... between 1930 and 1960 Antwerp and its surroundings were not spared any type of crime. At least that is what appears from the historical photograph collection of the federal police that is being shown for the first time in the exhibition Don't shoot to miss! The fact that the PhotoMuseum was given the chance to exhibit this collection is highly exceptional. The visual material from police archives is indeed sinister, spectacular, confidential, controlling, incriminating. It consists of images made by order of a judicial system, serving as evidence of criminal facts and intended for a select professional public. Even after the facts were precluded by lapse of time and the closing of the investigation files, dealing with the forensic visual material involved remains a problem. Although the photographs lose their judicial relevance with the passage of time, they still evoke extremely sensitive and timeless questions of life and death, crime and punishment, good and evil, guilt and innocence, normal and deviant, power and subjection. The human stories, dramas, acts and impulses that they conceal are often very recognisable and sometimes frighteningly strange for the viewer. Crime photographs continue to be so fascinating precisely because of this visual confrontation with the human condition. They repel because of their uncensored directness but also attract because they shed an authentic and privileged glance at a forbidden world of shadows. Photographs of murder and manslaughter are the most mesmerising because they appeal to our ultimate existential fear. Perhaps by facing our own mortality we hope to find an explanation for the rationally unfathomable that is death.
This enormous collection of images provides a good cross-section of the tasks that the scientific police performs in forensic investigations. It records fingerprints and footprints, description portraits, crime scenes, traces of burglary and tyres, bodies and autopsies, forged documents, soiled clothing, murder weapons, crime reconstructions … in short, all visual elements that may provide evidence of the nature and course of the crime.
Judicial photographs never show the crime itself, but only the décor, the traces, the aftermath or the reconstruction of the facts. Forensic photography is therefore essentially a historical investigation: it always produces images of crimes and acts already committed in the past, even if past means just yesterday or only a week ago.
In this way, the forensic eye generates specific aesthetics that balance between objective recording and latent narrative drama. The fact that crime photographs are legitimised by an official context lends them a kind of morbid beauty that is not intentional, but still emanates indisputable authority. It is precisely because of that institutional and medium-specific ambiguity in judicial pictures that we often see forensic aesthetics return as a model for visual strategies in contemporary art. Moreover, the aura of the crime is even reinforced by the mass media's sensational attention for the subject (in both documentary and cinematographic form). Free and applied images, real and fictitious representations have thus created a visual myth around terms such as 'crime' and 'danger', so that we cannot possibly imagine our visual culture and our museums without it.
