Criminal Files

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt gave J. Edgar Hoover unprecedented powers to

fight the kidnappings, killings, crime bosses, and criminals that flourished at that time.
Hoover countered the magnetism of such crime figures as Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie
Parker and Clyde Barrow, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Baby Face Nelson
with the sometimes graphic photographic images that the FBI used as evidence in court
or provided to the press. The wide dissemination of such images was of great
propaganda value to the government in its struggles with criminals.

By the mid-1940s, Hoover turned his attention to political radicalism, the incursion of the
Left, and the threat of the cold war. FBI photographs of this period focus on suspected
informers, spies, and any others deemed to be interested in the destruction of the
American way of life.

With the twenty-first century almost upon us, the role of science in criminological
investigations has never been more manifest. Evidence pictures are now made using a
blinding array of technologies to capture minute and often unseen cluesa shoe print or
the residue of a body once wrapped in a sack. The chance existence of latent
fingerprints on a murder victims palm is examined through chemical or microscopic
analysis. The turn-of-the-century triumph of fingerprinting over Bertillons anthropometric
measurement system as the crucial method of determining unique physical
characteristics has now given way to routine investigations into the genetic material that
differentiates one human being from another.

Surveillance & Identity

Surveillance was once restricted to wartime reconnaissance photography (such as
Harold Edgertons pictures made in preparation for D-Day), or to tailing suspected spies
during the cold war, or recording antiwar demonstrators in the 1960s and 1970s. Now,
surveillance cameras proliferate everywhere, from national borders to banks, from
apartment-building lobbies to street-corner traffic lights. The surveillance cameras that
once were used primarily to identify the perpetrator in the act of a crime or to survey the
potential criminal watch us as well.

Identification photographs are on our drivers licenses, our passports, and are often
added to our bank cards to prevent misuse by an unauthorized signer. The early
twentieth-century portraits of Peruvian miners, the identification pictures of Algerian
women, and the photographs of Cambodians held by the Khmer Rouge were also made
ostensibly for reasons of identification. But, as in these latter cases, it is not always
evident at the moment a picture is taken what purpose it may ultimately be made to
serve.

Social Perspectives on the Criminal

Jacob Riis was a social reformer and newspaper reporter who used photography to
assist in the description of New York City slum conditions in his 1890 book How the
Other Half Lives. He was pivotal in changing the perception of the poor as idle, ignorant,
and undeserving. The advent of the magnesium flash in 1887 enabled Riis to take
photographs that brought an immediacy to his tales of the living conditions of the urban
poor, although his subjects were often asleep, drunk, or too preoccupied or frightened to
object to the photography. Riis presented his work directly to the public in lantern-slide
shows, confronting his curious audiences with a world it could no longer ignore.

Tabloid newspapers also theatricalized the common poor and made the gangster vivid.
Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, was the most famous twentieth-century crime
photographer and his dramatic pictures of the mob matched the blackness of the
headlines. Not a social reformer, but rather a keen and wry observer of street life,
Weegee made pictures of crime scenes and the characters that populated them in
1930s and 1940s New York City. These images evoke not only an event itself, but the
moments surrounding its occurrence, and often have brief enigmatic captions that
heighten the drama of the captured instant.

MugShots and Evidence

Alphonse Bertillon standardized the mug shot and the evidence picture and developed
what he called photographie mtrique (metric photography). Bertillon intended this
system to enable its user to precisely reconstruct the dimension of a particular space
and the placement of objects in it, or to measure the object represented. Such pictures
documented a crime sceneand the potential clues in itprior to its being disturbed in any
way. Bertillon used special mats printed with cadres mtriques (metric frames) which
were mounted along the sides of these photographs. Included among these
photographies mtriques are those Bertillon called photographies strometriques
(stereometric photographs), which pictured front and side views of a particular object.

By 1854, efforts were underway in police departments throughout the United States to
create local archives of criminal images. These included daguerreotype portraits of
criminals and rogues galleries, which usually comprised cartes-de-visite placed in
racks or assembled into albums. Volumes of mug shots were compiled by local police
agencies as well as by private detective organizations such as the Pinkerton National
Detective Agency. Volumes containing records of aliens, for instance the itinerant
Chinese population, were probably used for purposes of immigration control. From the
1880s on, identifying details and photographs were commonly featured in the wanted
posters that were distributed widely to apprehend criminals.

Policemen themselves began to include photographs in albums either for private record,
as in the case of Jesse Brown Cooks scrapbooks, or to publicize police activity, as in
Thomas Byrnes Professional Criminals of America (1886). Byrnes book reproduced
photographs of mostly respectable looking criminals with accompanying comments.
Byrnes claimed that, contrary to popular opinion, criminals did not necessarily convey
by their physical appearance the nature of their activities.
Political and Social Outcasts
In the nineteenth century, as today, social outcasts and those whose political beliefs
made them criminals were subjects of both fear and fascination for the public at large. In
various hands and at different times, photographs of such individuals functioned as
evidence, propaganda, and identification of differences from the norm.

The small, card-mounted photographs taken by Louis H. Heller of the defeated leaders
of the Modoc Indian War of 1872-73 were sold in the San Francisco gallery owned by
photographer Carleton Watkins and depicted an ambiguous victory over the so-called
savages. Pictures of the dead Parisian Communards of 187071 were made to satisfy
the government that the Communards had opposed. Photographs depicting the
barbarity of Asian people especially the exotic customs of beheadings and physical
torture encouraged the belief that the European powers were morally superior to their
colonial subjects.

Early twentieth-century intellectuals romanticized the social outcast as belonging to a

special class or race. Photographs of these outsiders were prized and published in the
popular police magazines. Eugne Atget, whom the Surrealists embraced as a nave
artist, and whose ambiguous photographs of deserted areas in Paris were said to
resemble crime-scene pictures, was hired to photograph prostitutes. The novelist and
poet Pierre Mac Orlan included some of these pictures in his copy of Cesare
Lombrosos 1896 publication, La Femme criminelle e la prostitue (The Criminal
Woman and the Prostitute).

Race, Heredity, and the Criminal

The history of photography in the service of science is also the history of the way in
which photographs have sometimes been manipulated to prove a variety of scientific
and quasi-scientific claims. Duchenne de Boulognes photographs of patients receiving
electric shocks were offered as evidence that individuality played little part in the
expression of emotion and, by extension, behavior. The naturalist Louis Agassiz
collected daguerreotypes to further his study of racial differences and the revelatory
nature of external distinguishing featuresand to bolster his belief that the white
European male was a superior species. The Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso
subscribed to a theory that viewed the criminal as an example of reversion to a primitive
type and illustrated his discussions with photographs of what he considered to be such
types: epileptics and murderers, as well as tattooed criminals. Sir Francis Galtons
composite portraiture, based on merging physical characteristics of groups of
individuals into a single picture, was proffered as a tool to visualize such deviants as
the insane and the criminal.

Such conjectures were largely ignored by those involved in apprehending the criminal
as they offered little in the way of practical assistance to the police. In 1872, however,
the French police adopted an anthropometric system devised by Alphonse Bertillon,
whose portraits parls (speaking likenesses) delineated individual rather than general
characteristics of a criminals anatomy. Developed to assist in the apprehension of
recurrent criminals, the system was based on a series of measurements Bertillon
considered unique to each body and included descriptions of characteristic markings
accompanied by photographs. By 1893, his system had been widely adopted by police
departments in both Europe and the United States and contributed to a standardization
of police methods.

The American Outlaw

The outlaws who roamed the Wild West were principal characters in the imagination of
nineteenth-century Americans. Popular myths of such personalities were depicted in
cheap, sensational serials and were the highly prized subjects of photographers.
Photographs of the infamous Jesse James depicted a charismatic outcast, seemingly
beyond the reach of the law, while Solomon Butchers vignettes portrayed colorful
vigilante cowboys and settlers.

One of the earliest and most extensive series of pictures of political outlaws produced in
the United States was made by Alexander Gardner, a Washington, D.C. based portrait
photographer. Gardner was hired by the Secret Service in 1865 to document the
aftermath of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. He made full-length,
profile, and full-face portraits of each of the Lincoln conspirators, a method that would
become standard practice for law-enforcement photographers. Gardner attempted to
capitalize on his retention of the majority of his negatives by selling cartes-de-visite
(small pictures attached to calling-card-sized boards) and large-format prints of the
story. However, the public, shattered by the Civil War, was more interested in the
escapades of the romantic western outlaws.