Crime in Antwerp.
With photographs from Antwerp's Police Archives.
In: Paul Seawright - Field Notes, FOMU, Antwerp, 2005, pp. 36 - 40.
The Irish Photographer Paul Seawright's exhibition titles Field Notes will be partly combined in this book (and in the exhibition of the same name at the FotoMuseum of the Province of Antwerp) with forensic images taken from the historical archives of the Antwerp police force, dating from between 1930 up until 1960. Paul Seawright and Dominique Somers selected these images because – despite differences of function, form and time – a number of image strategies are revealed therein that articulate Paul Seawright's work.
Images that depict crime scenes, but never the crime itself, only the spatial parameters and physical traces of the crime. Forensic photography is in essence historical research: offences that are committed and past operations are still recorded, the only junction where they meet is the location where the conflict occurred. Today – 80, 60 or 40 years after the fact – the old police photos are no longer embedded in their contextual base is a discarded police dossier: the identities of involved parties have long since been given to posterity, along with their motives. What the photos loose in juristic relevance due to this, they gain in their suggestive capacity. The observer knows that a conflict has occurred at the exhibited location, he or she explores the image and its dramatic implications, but the recorded photo doesn't show any more than what is explained in the margins. This makes the image contextually viable for diverse interpretations, depending on the perspective and empathy of the observer.
Within criminology the location of the crime is the primary strategic point that has to be established in its original condition as fast as possible after the crime has been committed. Police apparatus cordons off the geographical site while the photographer freezes and limits the coordinates. The comprehension of the discovered situation of depictions drawn into a vacuum is almost tangible, bathed in mysterious silence, surrounded by the aura of the violent act that took place there. It's often striking how arbitrary the concrete relationship is between the crime scene and the crime: the innocent character of the banal landscape or interior is only compromised by the suggestion that a conflict has occurred at the exhibited place. Fact and site are inexorably connected, even when the pictures don't necessarily demonstrate this. Even the involved parties- perpetrators, victims, witnesses, police officers and photographers are never represented in the photographic frame. The abjectness and immobility of the subject lends a strong animistic character to the established situation, wherein only the traces of a latent presence are set out. Fragments of everyday spaces and objects are transformed in this manner into uncanny parables of anonymous threats that preceded the photographs. The implicit fear that we experience as observers transforms the coded decors from spatial archetypes of evil into bearers of cultural and social history, where the complexity of perception and memory is revealed. Forensic photographs confront the onlooker as a medium that acts as a regulatory and observant eye on our society, and bring the thorny relationship between aesthetic and taxonomic principles of this photographic category into question. Images of crime endure because they broach on ultimately sensitive and timeless questions of life and death, good and evil, guilt and innocence, normal and deviant, power and subjection. The human stories, deeds and impulses that are insinuated in the images are frequently very recognisable and sometimes frighteningly peculiar to the observer. This is why the visual confrontation of the human condition and images of crime remain so fascinating. They attract because the observer is given an authentic and privileged view that mirrors a world of shadows, but the expectations will never be fulfilled because these images only partially lift the veil. In this way the unnerving forensic view generates a specific aesthetic that balances between the objective registration and the latent dramatic narrative. The fact that images of crime are legitimised within an official framework provokes a sort of unintentional beauty that radiates unmistakable authority.
Owing to the institutionalised and specific duplicity of the medium, forensic aesthetic is frequently regarded as a model for image strategies in contemporary photographic practices. Like with Paul Seawright's work, forensic images infer more than the geography reveals, they give meaning to the interpretation of ideas, fears and prejudices of the observer.
