@article{ref1,
title="Crime scene photography in England, 1895-1960",
journal="Journal of British studies",
year="2018",
author="Bell, Amy",
volume="57",
number="1",
pages="53-78",
abstract="This article discusses the development of techniques and practices of murder crime scene photography through four pairs of photographs taken in England between 1904 and 1958 and examines their &quot;forensic aesthetic&quot;: the visual combination of objective clues and of subjective aesthetic resonances. Crime scene photographs had legal status as evidence that had to be substantiated by a witness, and their purpose, as expressed in forensic textbooks and policing articles, was to provide a direct transfer of facts to the courtroom; yet their inferential visual nature made them allusive and evocative as well. Each of four pairs of photographs discussed reflects a significant period in the historical evolution of crime scene photography as well as an observable aesthetic influence: the earliest days of police photography and pictorialism; professionalization in the 1930s, documentary photography, and film noir; postwar photographic expansion to the suburban and middle class, advertising images of the family and home; and postwar elegiac landscape photography in the 1950s and compassion shown to infanticidal mothers. Crime scene photographs also demonstrate a remarkable shift in twentieth-century forensic technologies, and they reveal a collection of ordinary domestic and pastoral scenes at the moment when an act of violence made them extraordinary.<p /><p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0021-9371",
doi="10.1017/jbr.2017.182",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2017.182"
}