Australian Murder Victims (1910-1960)

Excerpts from the forensic photography archive at the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney, Australia which contains an estimated 130,000 negatives created by the New South Wales Police between 1910 and 1960.

Bp Laval: Take the world in a love embrace!

“Laval creates a disturbing emotional wilderness, drawing us as viewers into his bush of ghosts with a sense that anything could happen—a couple doing it in the road, a threesome engaged on a mystic highway, a goddess as figurehead on the vehicle in the car chase. Voyeuristic, atavistic, altruistic”.

Laia Abril: An Unnerving Embrace from a Hermaphrodite

“The story of Manuel Blanco Romasanta is indeed shocking. Known as one Spain’s more notorious serial killers, Romasanta was described in period nomenclature as the “Tallow Man”, known for making soap from his murdered victims”

Pasquale Bove and Luca Santese: Vamos a la Landfill

“Perhaps she is transsexual. My only real experience with Italy prior to 2002 is when I tried desperately to buy weed from a transsexual prostitute along the outer wall of the Protestant cemetery in Rome. It ended in an angry dismissal of my interests and my being from said prostitute. “No sex, No weed Fucking American””

Cucurrucucu: Considering the Crime

“Perhaps it is a fantasy that one could wield power over the representation of death by its abstracted nature? Is this not a dangerous game to play god over the image of death?”

Indexing the Execrable: Stefan Ruiz’s Mexican Crime Photographs

“Here he has collected thieves and murderers, but mostly thieves. Los Ladrones. Sticky fingers”. Mexican Crime Photographs from the archive of Stefan Ruiz With dry and flaking fingers, the man combs over the contents of a shoe box full of rusty paperclips and tattered and some odorous pieces of paper featuring young men, so many […]

Collective Guilt: Amanda Knox’s Hologram of Truth

I watched it all unfold, the tears, the double-play with her boyfriend, ratting his tepid ass out just to get back home to her mother’s loving arms after slitting that poor girl’s throat because she couldn’t handle the fucking or the fucking drugs and I hate her.   The extradition, lies, the privileged little muppet […]

M.F.G. Paltrinieri & Mirko Smerdel – “The Looking Game” (2013)

  “What makes these pictures so unsettling?” A book with photographs taken by a serial killer connected to texts written by John Berger, which also happens to be the alias the killer was using when committing his crimes? I am certainly intrigued…   Fanny Landstrom interviews photography collector Brad Feuerhelm for ASX on M.F.G Paltrinieri’s […]

Mafia, Dead Bodies and Photography – Students Interview Letizia Battaglia (2001)

“To start, not all of the pictures that a photographer makes are important.” Photography as Art: The Involvement of the Photographer with His/Her Subject and Photography as Historical Evidence Transcribed February 9, 2001 Translated for ASX by Osvaldo Sanviti, 2013 Life goes on before us in a continuous flow. To freeze a fragment in an […]