Scenographics of Crime
TIANYU YANGABSTRACT
This is a project about the spatiality constructed around the human body and the crime scene. In contrast to superficial readings of the crime scene as a static space, Scenographics of Crime seeks to uncover the instability and temporality of the crime scene – a scenographic space charged with opportunity and danger for judicial narrative-making in its reclamation of power.
In the late 19th century, police detectives and examining magistrates, who used to mostly write and only occasionally draw, suddenly found themselves holding a shining new camera. Faced with a new media tension between drawing and photography, early criminologists invented a new set of judicialvisual rules, under which spaces, bodies, and their intermingled biological residues (blood) were not simply captured by a forensic way of “seeing,” but dissected, distorted, and re-distributed.
Scenographics tracks the emergence and evolution of crime scene documentation into the twentieth century, as well as the impact on the manipulation of spatial evidence by competing media – particularly drawing and photography – which inflected and to a degree determined the meaning of crime, its
interpretation, and implications. By returning to the original question of vision and spatiality at key scenographic moments in the history of crime media, my thesis addresses how criminal spatial evidence at the crime scene gave rise to a range of secondary spaces and situations — from police photo studio to crime museums. In turn, the work generated by these spaces and institutions has contributed to the mediatic tension between drawing and photography. Lastly, the thesis seeks to expose the mechanism of power behind the production and dissemination of crime media knowledge, made explicit by the Scenographics of Crime.
Scenography I: A False Beginning
Bertillon Apparatus at the Police Photo Studios
Scene I: Dresden Police Studio 1909
Friedrich Paul and the Short History of Crime Photography
Scenography II: Planimetric Drawing’s Objectivity Claim
Scene I: Mystery Plan
From Mystery Plan to Traveling Handbook
Prof. Dr. Hans Gross and the Criminalistics Institute
Problematizing the Criminal Portrait Photography Bertillon Apparatus in Studios
Crime Media Logic
Prehistory of Crime Scene Drawing in Perspective
Theorizing the Planimetric Drawing Hans Gross’s Secrete Love for Sketch The Unlikely Subject of a Multi-Media Criminalistic Capture
Scenography III: Eyes, Bodies and Power Cameraman in the Crime Scene
From Bird’s Eye to God’s Eye: the Dead Body "Escapes" the Crime Scene
The Expert’s Multi-Media P.O.V.: Drawing the Dead A Power Struggle: Who Controls a Poor Image?
For my advisor Mark Wasiuta, my dear friend and book designer Reem Yassin, my supportive cohort at the CCCP Program, my teachers Felicity Scott and Joanna Joseph, historian Christian Bachhiesl, and many more who had helped me along the way.
INTRODUCTION
In the thirties, Geogres Bataille reviewed a thin yellow book — X Marks the Spot, with which he identified a possible beginning for “a moral transformation affecting public attitudes towards violent death.”1 The images of dead gangsters in cafes, cars, lakes, and sidewalks, marked the beginning of a commercialized capture of the criminal bodies, made iconographic by the Weegee-style camera techniques. On the other hand, such god-trick images2, had not only abstracted the crime scene into an atmospheric setting, but the very meaning of crime itself. We are made to believe that the crime media has no history, no author, no logic, no spatiality of its own, other than what’s in front of our eyes — the ghost of a criminal.
For many, the manifest beginning of crime media is signified by another famous photo — a portrait of Alphonse Bertillon — or more precisely, a group of en face and en profile criminal portraits of himself, his friends, and his criminals — which haunts the contemporary account of crime media history just like how it used to dominate the criminological discourse during his time between 1879 to 1915. The seductive charm of the Bertillon Apparatus lies in its simplicity of assemblage —a blank backdrop, a chair with a headrest attached, a standing mirror and a camera, that is all it takes to subdue the criminal
body, and in this case, the colonized body, under a “scientific,” “standardized,” “objective” capture.
As the Bertillon Apparatus was being advertised far beyond the French border by a series of lectures, lab visits and international exhibitions, the judicial authorities, particularly, the police headquarters in German and Austro-Hungarian Empires welcomed it with great enthusiasm. The Bertillon Apparatus and this criminal anthropological lens came in handy as a campaign tool to install a positive public image for the imperial police, who was more than happy to appropriate the criminal portrait as the visual proof of its own vigilance in the turbulent times. And as the apparatus touched down in the two empires, it generated a series of police photo studios. Take the Dresden studio shown here as an example. It was engineered by a local camera manufacturer, according to the exact dimension necessary to hold the Bertillon Apparatus, and to maintain a continuous, one-directional flow of surveilled criminal bodies. Caught up in the buzz of new architecture and new “scientific” apparatus, the current version of crime media history is one about criminal anthropology. It distracts and obscures an alternative beginning — the drawing of crime scenes — in which the criminal body was, in fact, still at large.
Early Crime Scene Drawing: A Prehistory
While the exact time and place when drawing was first used to document the crime scene is difficult to pin down, my research locates the unofficial origin to 1727 in Stuttgart, Germany, where an almost planimetric drawing was made showing an ongoing fratricide.3 Otherwise, the majority of early crime scene drawing excavated by this project dates back to the mid 19th century, right around the time when portrait photography was first used to capture criminal portraits in prison.4
The first significant archive Scenographics works with is the Archives départementales du Var. Between the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, Var presented a temporary exhibition — “Que justice soit faite! Méthodes d’investigations varoises (18111958).” Although the exhibition deals with the new methods of investigations particularly implemented by the Court of Assizes of Var, it nevertheless provided a rare chance to acquire a much-needed general understanding of the early, informal history of crime scene drawing, and subsequently the emergence of crime scene photographs shortly before their institutionalization process.
Among the small number of crime scene drawings on display, two typologies, the perspectival and the planimetric, were adopted as means first, to rescue the crime scene from the detective’s memory loss and more importantly, its own material instability; secondly, to articulate the complex spatial relationships within. While the drawing in perspective were often filled with exquisite details, the planimetric drawings, on the other hand, relying heavily on
Scenographics begins by dismantling the rigorously seductive image of the criminal portrait photography, in order to rebuild a crime media history that starts with the drawing and takes root in the crime scene — the original space where judicial powers and tricks were first experimented, and as it would be proven, also a space impossible to be fully conquered by means of visual representation. Introduction Introduction
the architectural language, proved to be the better medium to articulate complex spatial relationships. As a result, the planimetric began to dominate the crime media landscape after the 1870s, right around when the photography entered the scene.
Even as the crime photograph took over the perspective angle, the anxiety and danger associated with perspective drawing, though transformed, still persisted into the new photographic media. The conceptual gap between the perspectival and planimetric was thus formed, not only due to a mediatic segregation (i.e., drawing and photography), but as a result of a larger epistemic shift in the evidence discourse from a technical question of legibility to a judicial question of credibility.
Instrumentalizing the Planimetric
As far back as in the mid 18th century, the limit, application, and definition of evidence had been widely discussed among lawyers, clergyman, and philosophers. Notably, the legal principle of “bestevidence rule” was invented by Geoffrey Gilbert, which puts different forms of evidence into a judicial hierarchy based on legal weights. The written, original document is on top, following which are the copies and verbal accounts.5 In the early 19th century, such hierarchy was re-enforced by the introduction of “circumstantial evidence,” which legitimize what Alexander Welsh called, “a brag of circumstances cannot lie.”6 The circumstances, to which witness testimonies had to be measured against, conveniently legitimized the crime scene as a judicially significant site in which dead body, objects, traces could
all be captured in written text, to form a “strong representation.”7 Before drawings or photographs were widely presented in court, such text-based crime scene documentation was most frequently criticized for its lack of spatial clarity, and for its tedious length that often sent the jurors to a dreamy haze, only rarely, on for its credibility.8 By the time when drawing entered the crime scene after the 1850s, however, the kind of judicial distrust of a witness’s testimony had evolved into a distrust of subjectivity in general. A problem of credibility was added to the existing issue of legibility. Like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s scientific atlas, the crime scene drawing unavoidably had to make an “objectivity” claim.
For the non-German-speaking part of the world, Dr. Prof. Hans Gross, Austrian criminologist and a contemporary of Alphonse Bertillon, is an unfamiliar figure, even if most forensic textbooks would address him as the “father of criminology.” In the little-known per onal history of Hans Gross, he dedicated the last 15 years of his life trying to establish a Criminalistic Institute hIn contrast to his strange, unjustified anonymity, Gross’s criminalistic handbook, Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter, Polizeibeamte, Gendarmen, 9 had attracted significant interests from the fields of criminal law, forensic medicine, and judicial practices (especially, the early development of “scientific police”), for almost a century – spanning from 1893 all the way to the 1970s. Most notably, its first English edition came out of Madras, Colonial India. Like the Bertillon Apparatus, as Gross’s handbook touched down, it morphed as it created new tensions with the local protocols, inscribing new rules, imperial biases, and progresses too. Such was the context in which the crime scene drawing was first theorized.
Consciously or not, as Hans Gross began to develop a rather “complete” system of crime scene drawing in his handbook, down to the minute detail of what paper to use, the hierarchical set of drawings he recommended was overwhelmingly planimetric. The room, the house, and even what he called, “the environ of the house” all followed religiously the objective rules set by the architectural plan, each is drawn based on a rigorous sequence of on-site measurement, strict abstraction, and abbreviated annotation. Even the wall thickness, for example, is realistically rendered.
Interestingly, while Gross relied on the plan drawing’s objective claim to institutionalize the use of crime scene drawing as a credible and valuable form of crime media documentation, when it comes to the issue of “rough sketch” — a type of drawing would not fit into a narrative of “mechanical objectivity”11 by any standard, he could not bring himself to remove it completely from his handbook.10 In the space between vaguely useful and vaguely problematic, the rough sketch in perspective is temporarily put on an institutional probation.
Crime Scene Photograph’s New Objectivity
Between 1879 and 1915, photography as a crime media was coming of age. After a decade of feverish criminal portrait production, the “Identification Offices” (“Erkennungsdienst” or “Erkennungsamt”) at the police photo studio, were eager to extend the use of photography from the criminal bodies to the crime scene. A proliferation of crime scene photo equipment like travel-sized cameras, portable tripods, and even specialized traveling handbags (likely filled with lenses), began to rush into the foreground.
The popularization of the bird’s eye view came at a moment when the camera’s powerful promise of “mechanical objectivity” finally began to attract scrutiny. The question of how to achieve a truthful capture had become significantly more complicated. Losing the objectivity previously promised to the criminal portrait photography by a mechanical-bureaucratic system of control (i.e., police photo studio), the cameraman in the crime scene, who were often amateur photographers or commercial portrait photographers, and “had rarely a correct idea of what to do” as Gross commented,12 necessarily had become a new site of technical debate and the bureaucratic discipline.
Hence the Bird’s Eye View is invented — even though it is technically incapable of capturing a true aerial vision of a flying bird — on some occasions, the tripod could only elevate the human eye by less than a meter — but such a slight elevation seemed to have packed enough unfamiliarity in the photographs it produced, to make it appear automated and neutral, at least in the eyes of the imperial police.
Introduction
In a sense, what the Hamburg Police attempted to achieve by adopting the Bird’s Eye Apparatus was not the elimination of human vision, but the aesthetic cleaning of the camera man’s subjectivity. The Bird’s Eye View was effectively a structured aerial vision that put the camera man under surveillance through its ever so slightly unfamiliar, perched perspective angle, one that predicts the future militarization of the view in WWI.
In 1900, Friedrich Paul, an Imperial-Royal judge in Olomouc, Austro-Hungarian Empire, wrote an extensive handbook on the “Criminalistic Photography.” At the time, Hans Gross, who started teaching criminal law at the University of Chernivtsi, wrote the foreword for Paul’s handbook. In it, Gross applauded Paul’s unique vision, who, as both a criminalist and scientific photographer, could “know what the former needs and what the latter is capable of.” 13 In the handbook, Paul introduced in length the latest technological advancement in the imperial photo industry, and recommended, sometimes even presented his own schemes like architectural plans for an ideal police photo studio,14 the detailed application of photocopy and enlargement apparatuses, and most importantly, the crime scene photographic techniques.
For Paul, one of the most significant inventions in the handbook is the apparatus of photographing the dead body from above. The same angle was adopted and made famous — without crediting him — by Alphonse Bertillon in his 1909 invention of metric photography. Posthumously, Bertillon’s shocking portraits of the dead bodies seen from above came to be known as the “God’s Eye Introduction
View.” Paul referred to this new vision as capable of producing “completely correct recordings.” And for comparison, he showed another photograph of a dead female body, taken from a lower angle in which the part of body closer to the camera appeared to be larger (out of proportion) from the rest – a somewhat convincing example of “error of lens.” The latter image, when placed side-by-side with the God’s Eye View image, unavoidably evokes a familiar, mediatic tension between the planimetric and the perspectival. As the picture plane aligned perfectly with the ground plane where the body had fallen, the crime scene had then collapsed into a mere two-dimensional backdrop, not dissimilar to the blank backdrop used in the Bertillon Apparatus. In this sense, the dead body and the criminal body’s mediatic fate mirrored each other. Made apparent by adopting the same set of objectivity marker as Gross’s plan drawings, Paul’s God’s Eye View acquired “mechanical objectivity” not from a photographic means, but by borrowing the appearance of a planimetric drawing.
While in both the Bird’s Eye View and the God’s Eye View seem to suggest a shift in the judicial photographic techniques towards further flattening, abstracting, and making strange the crime scene, the scene is invariable always still, intentionally kept there. The insistence of keeping the body in the crime scene, even if at times only as a symbolic gesture (God’s Eye View), can be read as judicial authority’s attempt at re-enforcing their claim over the dead body, which, at the time, was being literally snatched away, from the crime scene, by the medical-judicial experts. The latter often would present photographs of the dead body in court too, though rarely concerned with
the quality of the image, as his expert status would authorize him to speak on be half of the dead, even if the representation appears to be “casual,” subjective, or “poor.” 15
By the end of the 20th century, experts of various kinds, such as botanist, toxicology, physicist, and microscopists, began to flood the European courts, each of them brought along a small black box of knowledge, ready to impress the jury. Such a drastic reorganization of the judicial power structure was a result of previously mentioned epistemic shift of the evidence hierarchy. A consolidated judicial power that used to belong to the police detectives and the examining magistrate, is now divided and shared with the ever-expanding list of expert witnesses. In the new, unfamiliar struggle to maintain its judicial power, conveniently the crime scene had become the site of interest. Afterall, if the physical space of the crime was to only to be visited and managed by the same authority that was meant to perform and present its representation, no expert could then bypass the judicial authority completely, as all evidence unavoidably had a spatial relationship involving the crime scene. Naturally, when the crime scene as a physical space was made to disappear, judicial authority could then attain the maximum control over its spatiality through crime media, not dissimilar to the way it exercised its judicial power over the criminal body in the making of criminal portraits.
In this sense, Friedrich Paul’s God’s Eye and Hamburg Police’s Bird’s Eye can be read as a photographic tool to simultaneously acquire the plan drawing’s objectivity and to announce judicial ownership of the subject matter by strengthening its
association with the image of the crime scene.
As for the crime scene photographs taken from a Human Eye View, the most notable “objectivity” claim was made by Alphonse Bertillon in 1909 with the invention of “metric photography.” Much of the “metric photography” replies on a persepctometer template, on which the crime scene photos are pasted. Theoretically speaking, by transcribing the coordinates taken from the crime scene photographs into a corresponding, fan-shaped template, a plan drawing depicting the spatial relationship of the specific crime scene fragment could be automatically produced. Though technically flawed, it was hugely successful as a crime media technique, as Bertillon managed to permanently elevate the Human Eye to the God’s Eye by subjugating the planimetric drawing under the crime scene photograph. Years to come, the metric photography template was used in every single crime scene photograph ever produced by the Préfecture de Police in Paris (where Bertillon worked) as a graphic signature.
In the final iconographic space of Bertillon’s photographic template, the simultaneous removal of cameraman and draughtsman’s subjectivity, is in fact the glorification of the human eye view of a single man — Alphonse Bertillon himself, whose viral crime media logic had illustrated the performative display of judicial control over the crime scene by way of crime media at its finest. As for the criminalist Hans Gross, who followed an insulated, practical, educational media logic, his body of work survived time largely as a body of practical knowledge, left authorless in the form of police printout, bulletins, and slideshows.
Methodology and Terminology
In this project, to address the massive, fragmented crime media landscape, I took a rigorous approach of organizing everything into four “scenographies” — the last one being an epilogue. Each “scenography” is then composed of three to four “scenes.”
A “scene,” in this booklet, is a “scenedocument.” It is the entirety of the space and objects that is contained in a crime media document. The word “scene” is chosen with respect to its original meaning — one that is defined as a “stage” or a “setting,” and gestures to a more focused definition of “material apparatus of a theatrical stage.”16 Unlike the crime scene, which is a real, physical space, the “scene-document” recognizes its two-dimensionality, and subsequently acknowledges the incompletion and distortion in its theatrical spatiality. A “scene” is then accompanied by an investigative voice, which assumes a naïve and authoritative relation to the “scene” on display17, in order perform a narrative construction by “reading the scene,” a simulated process of how an early 20th century juror or professional spectator would have done in court, museum, and other settings.
As the individual scenes are called out, named and with its meaning fixed by the crime media investigator, they are then “positioned”18 by a synthesizing voice within a concrete discourse, or a “scenography of crime.” Here, the word “scenography” refers to the visual rules and tricks of the theatrical stage-making, and for this project, it is used as a synthesizer of a durational discourse and a large “stage” the “scenes” are built into.
Specifically, the first scenography — “A False Beginning — Bertillon Apparatus at the Police Photo Studios,” dismantles the criminal portrait as an “acknowledge origin” of crime media by returning to the Imperial Police Headquarters photographic studios; the second scenography — “Planimetric Drawing’s Objectivity Claim,” builds an alternative origin of crime media around the co-evolution of two types of crime scene drawing – the perspectival and the planimetric in the archival space of Hans Gross’s traveling Handbook; the third scenography — “Eyes, Bodies and Power — Cameraman in the Crime Scene,” investigates judicial authority, Friedrich Paul, and Alphonse Bertillon’s attempt at reclaiming the judicial power by a performative institutionalization of the forensic “eye” and the production of “completely correct” photos outside the studio, into the crime scene; and, last but not the least, in the fourth scenography — “An Epilogue: Crime Media in Flux,” dives in the last territories where the crime scene documents and the writing on techniques reside, namely, the crime museums, the handbooks, and the newspapers, and the courtrooms, to compare Hans Gross’s “Crime Museum Media Logic” with Alphonse Bertillon’s “Viral Media Logic,” in order to find clues about the state and shape informing the commercial media logic today.
While the four “scenographies” are used to deconstruct a particular assemblage of crime media knowledge, the word “scenogrphics” in the project title came from a concept developed by art historian Rachel Hann, which represents the ambition of my project — addressing an overarching methodology of crime media, with the investigation of an endless crime media landscape.
1. Bataille, Georges, “X Marks the Spot — Chicago, ‘the Spot Publishing Company, 1930, in 4,’” Revue des Publications.
2. Donna Haraway defines the “god-trick” in her essay, “The Persistence of Vision,” as “self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even”
3. Hauptstaats Archive in Stuttgart Germany.
4. Jäger, Jens, “Photography: a means of surveillance? Judicial photography, 1850 – 1900,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 2001, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2001), pp. 27-51.
5. Gilbert, Geoffrey, the Law of Evidence, 1756.
6. Welsh, Alexander, Strong Representation: Narrative and Circumstatnial Evidence in England, 1992.
7. Ibid.
8. There were occasions in which, the jurors would request to visit the crime scene in person in order to verify a certain claim made by the investigating magistrate in the Austro-Hungarian context. The book will return to this point in Scenography II.
9. This is the German title for the first edition, published in 1893 in Graz. The title had gone through a series of changes, especially in its translated (and rewritten) English editions, which will be further addressed in Scenography II.
10. Hans Gross did not in fact include any rough sketches as an example in the handbook. Rather, he mentioned the usefulness of the “rough sketch,” about which he said, “if well drawn, such sketches will often throw stronger light upon and give more information about the situation than an accurate drawing in which all the details are scrupulously measured to within a fraction of an inch but which as a rule does not give so good a general idea as the rough sketch itself.” (Gross, Handbook, 1907, PP 450)
11. Daston, Lorraine., & Galison, Peter. Objectivity. 2007.
12. Gross, Hans, Handbook.
13. Gross, Hans, “Foreword,” Handbook of Criminalistic Photography, 1900.
14. Paul’s involvement with the early Imperial police photo studios will be introduced in the Scenography I.
15. The “poor” image here is a reference to Hito Steyerl’s reading of “the concept-in-becoming of the images.”
16. https://www.etymonline.com/word/scene
17. Sekula, Allan, “Invention of Photographic Meaning,” Sekula performed his “hardly innocent reading” to two monumental photographs of Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz’s in a similar way.
18. Haraway, Donna, “The Persistence of Vision,” “Positioning is, therefore, the key practice grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision.”
A False Beginning
To dismantling the criminal portrait as an “acknowledge origin” of crime media by returning to the Imperial Police Headquarters’ photo studios.
It is a cloudy day outside. Scene I
Dresden Studio - 1909
Inside, a dramatic inclination of glazed roof drips all the way down to the ground, almost, showering the room with natural light, evenly, gently, uninterrupted by the army of curtains, drawn to the far end. Below, two dark, wooden doors are tightly shut, so is the one close in our field of vision, making a mediatic fact explicit: the illusion of openness nevertheless confines.
Proudly presented in the center of the room is what looks like a custome made apparatus for taking portrait photographs. It exerts
a heavy, wooden presence by cutting diagonally into the scene with a great force. In the back, two clusters of machines — three cameras on tripods and the skioptikon set –respond to the same centrifugal pull by posing themselves in such way that each object can enjoy an uninterrupted visual integrity.
However, what attempts to deliver a harmonious visuality obscures its obvious sacrifices. Two details give away a hidden clue. The easel in the background looks as if fitting perfectly between the portrait apparatus and the photomicrograph camera, in fact prohibits the door behind it from its normal use. In the foreground, the imposing portrait apparatus cuts the path on the floor in half, creating a circulation pinch point. Obviously, the scene is posed, for display.
Friedrich Paul and the Short History of Crime Photography
At the 1909 Dresden International Photographic Exhibition, under the sub-category exhibition of the “Application of the Photographic Services of thse Administration of Justice, Traffic, Municipality and State Government,”1 Dresden Police Headquarter, representing the Kingdom of Saxony’s highest judicial-bureaucratic achievements, was eager to flex its techno-muscle in front of its peers and an international audience. Police headquarters from German Empires and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, and even lesser-known places (to the Euro-American audience) like Japan, Turkey and Russian were invited to attend the Exhibition. While some rejected the invitation, police authorities from Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg showed great enthusiasm in sharing their period achievement in photography, and setup individual exhibition booths alongside the Dresden Police Headquarters. Scene I was the perfect image created for the very purpose — putting the Dresden Police’s techno-objects on an uninterrupted display in front of the fierce international competition.
This was by no means a real beginning of crime media history, but for many, it represents a perfectly fine manifest, new start — the criminal portrait photography on its way to take over the entire crime media landscape. In fact, by the year 1909, the application of photography was no longer something new for policemen in the great industrial cities of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Britain. If anything, it signifies the beginning of a long outro for
a heated period of discussions and experimentations on criminal portrait photography which spanned from the 1850s to the late 1890s.2
Such was the occasion when Friedrich Paul, an Austro-Hungarian criminalist and scientific photographer,3 walked into the Dresden Exhibition and found himself once again standing in front of the familiar Dresden Police Studio. The top-floor police photo studio, first appeared as the cover image for Paul’s 1900 seminal “Handbook of Criminalistic photography,”4 only to re-emerged as a definitive highlight in his long report for the 1909 Dresden Exhibition.5 The studio, caught in between an imperial narrative and a personal one, became a site of great significance in which the short history of criminal portrait photography collided with Friedrich Paul’s personal attempt at constructing a criminalistic photo theory.
1. Paul, Friedrich, “Die kriminalistische photographie auf der internationalen photographischen Ausstellung in Dresden (Mai bis Oktober 1909).” Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, vol. 36-37, 1910.
2. Jäger, Jens, “Photography: a means of surveillance? Judicial photography, 1850 – 1900,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 2001, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2001), pp. 27-51.
3. Gross, Hans, “Preface,” Handbuch der kriminalistischen Photographie, 1900. Gross introduced Paul as: “He is both a criminalist and scientific photographer, therefore knows what the former needs and what the latter is capable of.”
4. Paul, Friedrich, “Handbuch der kriminalistischen Photographie für Beamte der Gerichte, der Staatsanwaltschaften und der Sicherheitsbehorden,” 1900.
5. Paul, Friedrich, “Die kriminalistische photographie auf der internationalen photographischen Ausstellung in Dresden (Mai bis Oktober 1909).” Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, vol. 36-37, 1910.
Scene II
Dresden Studio - 1900
What seems to have been the very same studio, has a different look.
The proliferation and the pure presence of machine is replaced by a sense of emptiness. Or rather, bareness — the floor is suddenly exposed, without pattern, furniture, or different kinds of gadgets. Indeed, the room barely looks like a photo studio. It could be just about any other clean, empty room, where a temporary display of the portrait apparatus just happens to find itself in. Only occasionally, the curved ceiling glazing reminds us of its resemblance to the previous scene.
Of course, the real star of the scene is still the portrait apparatus at work, which, in this version, consists of a constellation of moving parts: the sitter, the chair, the blank backdrop, the cameraman, the camera, a standing mirror.
Problematizing the Criminal Portrait Photography
Make no mistake, the loosely arranged group of objects, is the same portrait apparatus appeared in Scene I. Nine years later, the apparatus was the only techno-character that not only survived but evolved during a period of rapid technological expansion in the imperial photo industry and the subsequent a technology-enhanced institutionalization of the criminal portrait photography. The portrait apparatus, otherwise, famously known as the Bertillon Apparatus, played a significant role.
Most crime media historians traced the first emergence of crime photograph to the 1850s, when early criminal portraits were taken by prison officials in Belgium and the UK, as a means of identification, and in some cases, as form of punishment.1 These early attempts were geographically and historically adjacent to the moment when the photographic register at the Metropolitan Police Office was established in 1871, following the Habitual Criminal Act (1869). While such origin story made sense, it cleverly obscured an even more disturbing origin— the en face and en profile style criminal portrait has its root in the colonial anthropology projects, like the daguerreotype portraits of the South Carolina plantation slaves, taken by photographer J.T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850.2 As Alphonse Bertillon took the initiative to standardize the criminal portrait photography with first the introduction of the Bertillon Apparatus in 1890, then the anthropometric system of scientific body measurements in 1909, by the turn of the century, the
criminal portrait photography had took a full circle back to its colonial roots, as the Bertillon Apparatus was being used to capture indigenous bodies in the courtyard of the house of the French Mission in Bolivia.3 (Fig. 1)
Hence, to eliminate such parallel practices of capturing the criminal bodies and the colonized bodies with essentially the same photographic apparatus, it effectively displaced and denied an innate violence rooted in the history of criminal portrait photography and the emerging field of criminal anthropology.
Bertillon Apparatus in Studios [
For the most part, just like the rest of the judicial world in German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, Friedrich Paul was heavily influenced by French police clerk Alphonse Bertillon’s work on criminal portrait photography. The Bertillon Apparatus, for the better or worse, had become the de-facto centerpiece of Paul’s Handbook.
Such was case when a hand-drawn architectural plan of the Dresden Police Photo Studio was introduced in the Handbook as an example of a “very appropriately furnished studio.”4 (Fig. 2)
According to Paul, the studio consists of three parts. First, a pose studio connected to a sizable a workshop through a sliding door. In fact, the two connected rooms were the exact space depicted in Scene II. Interesting enough, the workshop in the background was not only used for preparing photographic copies, but also to produce plan drawings, maps, and models, all of which, of course, was left out of the demonstrative image of Scene II, as it was meant to only draw attention to the Bertillon Apparatus in the foreground. Then, there is an elongated anteroom, used for the circulation of criminal bodies and as the storage for photographic plates and utensils. And finally, a darkroom with a fairly small footprint. Both of these rooms and their functions, like the workshop, were hidden from view in Scene I, behind the closed door.
In fact, upon seeing the Dresden studio’s plan drawing, it seemed that both scenes were made to look like as if the Dresden Police Photo Studio
was designed for the sole purpose of capturing the criminal portraits according to the Bertillon Apparatus. In another plan drawing — a schematic photo studio layout (Fig.3) designed by Friedrich Paul as “a cheap, appropriate system that can probably be implemented anywhere,”5 such logic was made even more explicit.
In Paul’s ideal plan, the entire photo studio is organized around the Pose Studio A in the center, the dimension of which is just enough to fit the Bertillon Apparatus diagonally. The rest is laid out almost as a mirrored image of the Dresden Studio: Workshop K is used for cutting, cashing, calendaring prints; Darkroom B is connected to Studio A via a small Drawer V; Corridor P, is used for the control of criminal bodies and the U1 and U2 on the side are used as storage.
It’s easy to forget who the photographic subject is when the sitter in the demonstrative photo in Scene II was dressed in tailor suits and polished shoes. Friedrich Paul, however, did not hold back from explaining in detail how, in his ideal plan, a prisoner would enter Studio A via Door R, accompanied by a security officer. He/she would then proceed to sit at the Chair H — part of the Bertillon Apparatus, to have the en face and en profile portraits taken. Afterwards, the prisoner would exit from a different Door S, while the next prisoner would already be entering the studio via Door R. A continuous circuit is thus formed, in which the fully surveilled and controlled criminal bodies are captured by the B. Apparatus at an incredible pace — 80 portraits could be taken in just a single morning.6
In making the ideal studio as small as possible, Friedrich Paul had eliminated any alternative use of the Police Photo Studio other than capturing criminal portraits through the Bertillon Apparatus. But the reality is — the pose studio in Dresden had turned out to be a lot more flexible and forgiving than the one designed by Paul, and perhaps, the space hidden by the scenes might return to the foreground with new directions.
A New Kind of Portrait Apparatus and an Imperial Crime Media Logic
Bertillon Apparatus, as illustrated in Anthropologie Metrique, is made up of a group of objects, just like Scene II demonstrated. (Fig. 4) The seductive charm of Bertillon Apparatus lies precisely in its simplicity of assemblage —a blank backdrop, a chair with a headrest attached, a standing mirror and a camera, that is all it takes to subdue the criminal body, under a “scientific,” “standardized,” “objective” capture. The kind of rigid, built-in version of Bertillon Apparatus as seen in Scene I, was in fact nowhere to be found in Bertillon’s original writing or the archives of Préfecture de Police in Paris where he worked. So, what exactly happened in between the two scenes that prompted the Dresden Police Headquarters to embrace a new model of B. Apparatus?
A year before Scene II was published as F. Paul’s Handbook cover, in 1898, Vienna was in a spree of celebratory exhibitions to celebrating the 50th anniversary for Emperor Franz Josef I’s rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the Anniversary Exhibition (Jubiläumsausstellung), as part of the Pavilion of Welfare Exhibition (Wohlfahrtsausstellung), an exhibition booth is put together by the Vienna Police Headquarters to show the development and activities of the Vienna police over the past 50 years.7 Here, Friedrich Paul saw a collection of replicas for the Bertillon Apparatus, produced by the R. Lechner Company. One can only guess how this early replica looked like, whether it was the original or the rigid new model. But by the time when the Vienna Police Headquarters came to the Dresden
International Photographic Exhibition in 1909, the B. Apparatus they brought on display was unmistakably the rigid new version, which was carefully branded on the side: “R. LECHNER. WIEN.” (Fig. 5)
Like many companies in German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of 19th century, R. Lechner did not start out by making cameras, nor did they stay politely within the bound of photo industry in the years to follow. For R. Lechner, its prehistory was one that had to do with books. Started out as a small antique bookstore, in 1874, it became the “kuk Hofbuchandlung,” an imperial-royal bookstore, since many members of the imperial family had become their customers. When the Company took a photographic turn in 1885 and started to make cameras, under the direction of Alfred Werner, who was one of the funding members of the Imperial-Royal Photographic Society in Vienna, it also kept the publishing of photographic handbooks, magazines and artbooks business alive. Later in 1900, R. Lechner’s photographic department was moved into a factory building, where aircraft camera was produced for the Austrian Air Force during WW II. 8
Posed against the Imperial-Royal backdrop, R. Lechner the photographic manufacturer and book publisher, found itself inside a world where the court, police, military, medical science, and photographic community were much closer than it had ever been (or ever will be). Such closeness in some ways encouraged the private companies to behave like a public entity, so much so that, as Friedrich Paul applauded, they were able to “push the business aspect into the background to a certain extent,”9 and took on projects that produced special apparatuses with very limited possibility of sales. So, at the brief moment when the political interest of R. Lechner aligned with the Vienna Police Headquarters’ — to defend a positive public image for the imperial
authority by appropriating the criminal portraits as visual proofs of its own vigilance in the turbulent times, the new model of B. Apparatus was invented as part of a larger techno-Imperial project
As for the rigidity expressed through the new B. Apparatus model, shared between the “R. Lechner – Vienna Police Headquarters” and the “Heinrich Ernemann – Dresden Police Headquarters,” it could be read as a response to an imperial anxiety of not having a sufficient bureaucratic control over its massive territory. While Alphonse Bertillon had the authority and popularity to test out his photographic protocols from concept to practice at the Paris Police Headquarters — for example, the rules of situating the criminal bodies into the apparatus with precision could be religiously enforced by regular police clerks, the imperial police headquarters, on the other hand, follows a different crime media logic, in which they preferred to have their favorite photographic manufacturers design an infallible machine in which no adjustment was necessary and where imperfection was tolerated. 10
1. Jäger, Jens, “Photography: a means of surveillance? Judicial photography, 1850s to 1900,” in Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 2001, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2001), pp 27-51.
2. Ibid, pp38.
3. Bertillon, Alphonse., & Dr. A. Chervin, Anthropologie Métrique, 1909.
4. Paul, Friedrich, “Handbuch der kriminalistischen Photographie für Beamte der Gerichte, der Staatsanwaltschaften und der Sicherheitsbehorden,” 1900.
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Hans Gross, “Die Ausstellung der к. k. Polizeidirection in Wien auf der Jubiläumsausstellung in Wien,” Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik v1 1898-1899.
8. http://www.photohistory.at/lechner.htm
9. “Die kriminalistische photographie auf der internationalen photographischen Ausstellung in Dresden (Mai bis Oktober 1909).” Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, vol. 36-37, 1910.
10. In terms of both sharpness of the image and the treatment of light.
Scene III
On the occasion of 1909 Dresden International Photographic Exhibition
Inside the Dresden Police Headquarter display booth, photographs taken outside of the studio —inside the crime scenes, or, of the dead bodies — had not only invaded the limited exhibition space but taken the best display spots.
Crime Scene Media’s Insurgence
The new form of B. Apparatus rejected a purist representation as seen in Scene II. In returning to Scene I, where the B. Apparatus in the foreground and the proliferation of apparatuses in the background together mark a joint imperial desire of creating a special kind of criminalistic photography, one that is signified by the physical display of a variety sets of mechanical objects — the proliferation itself was the point.
Following F. Paul’s text on the 1909 Dresden International Photographic Exhibition space, while B. Apparatuses could be seen everywhere — police photo studios in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, all had some form of Bertillon Apparatus on display, it is however never to be seen in complete isolation. A proliferation of camera equipment had become a symbol of “scientific,” “imperial” policing. Just to name a few: the travel camera on tripod is a must-have item for taking crime scene photographs; the overhead camera with a built-in ladder is a special apparatus made to take photo of the dead bodies from a God’s Eye View; the skioptikon with a built-in light source and a camera is meant to be used for recording latent (blood) fingerprints.
Like Scene I positively illustrates, the police photo studio was no longer meant to only confine, nor to be confined by the Bertillon Apparatus. And as Scene III displays, even though the criminal portrait photography and the expanded application of criminal anthropology still occupies much of the front row attention, a shift from an anthropometric
imprisonment of the photographic medium to a scenographic liberation was quietly underway, with which the shape and meaning of crime would no doubt change along with the crime media technology — the crime scene drawing and crime scene photography would both rush to the foreground at different moments in an alternative crime media history, as Friedrich Paul, Hans Gross and Alphonse Bertillon will show in the following scenographies.
Plan Drawing's Objectivity Claim
In the archival space of Hans Gross’s traveling Handbook, building an alternative origin of crime media around the co-evolution of two types of crime scene drawing –the perspectival and the planimetric.
Mystery Plan
At the first glance, the simple line drawing, Scene I
reveals but the C-shaped layout of a one-story building. Looking closer, one may start to see the key places, annotated with letters, signs, and simple dimensions.
The houses are numbered: 59, 60, 61, and 62. But among them, as only No. 60 and No. 62 were drawn with their details of column, stairs, and walls. Undoubtedly, these are the real crime scene.
Letter “p,” likely to represent “portico,” “v” as “vestibule,” and “c” as “courtyard,” all of which seems standard enough. The only mystery left is the letter “x,” more likely than not, marks the bodies of the dead. On the bottom of the page, a scale bar seals the drawing like a stamp — approving its measurability.
From Mystery Plan to the Traveling Handbook
The particular scene was one of many planimetric, line drawings, depicting the spatiality of crime scenes in the book — Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook for Magistrates, Police Officers and Lawyers. On the title page, aside from the name of the author, “Dr. Hans Gross,” one can find the name of translators listed with the same size of font as well– “John Adam, M.A., Barrister-at-Law” and “J. Collyer Adam, Barrister-at-Law.” In the 900-page crime encyclopedia, Scene I is found in “Chapter 7: Drawing and Applied Arts” — the first chapter of “Part III: Crafts Special to the Investigating Officer.” In the body of text, the author(s) introduced this drawing as an example to show how without it, it would have been impossible for the jury to understand the circumstances surrounding a particular crime, as it unfolded three dimensionally in the crime scene.
However, judging from the few words that addresses the context and content of the case, the scene reading in the beginning, is proved to be full of errors.
It turns out: “p” is not “portico” but represents “pials” — a kind of raised platform; the “v” stands for “vasal” instead of “vestibule,” which is an entrance passage special to the Southern India; and while the “x-es” indeed indicate where the bodies were found, except for the one inside a small room, in fact, indicates not where the victim died but where he was sleeping, shortly before he was murdered on the roof. The misreading of annotations reveals a
curious fact: the houses depicted in Scene I does not illustrate a crime scene anywhere near Austria where the book was originally written, instead, it came from a real burglary-turned-violent murder case, in Madras (today’s Chennai), Colonial India. The author(s) explains their intention for showing the particular plan drawing: “Indian houses, except in large towns where great blocks of flats or chauls have been constructed, are usually simple in plan. They are generally one storied, although of course, and especially in towns, superstructures may be erected on the roof. Yet although the construction be simple, a plan is often imperative.” 1
In this case, the text also offered more details about the case: the bugler-killer entered the scene through the unbolted vasal in 62, got on to the roof, which was connected to 60. The owner of 62 heard the noise, rushed upstairs to the roof, where he was subsequently stabbed to death. The thing happened to a resident from 60, who was previously sleeping in the room marked x. The simple case was made complicated by the spatial layout of a traditional Indian House. Evidently, without the drawing, it would have been incredibly difficult to describe the assumed spatial sequence to a colonial jury that may or may not be familiar with the special housing typology. But one question remains: how did a planimetric drawing of an Indian House found its way into an Austrian Handbook?
During the Madras Presidency, the colonial
police was supervised by the magistrates, who, at the same were responsible for administering the district courts. It was against this backdrop, two translators – John Adam and his son J. Collyer Adam– were working in the legal-judicial system in Madras. The father was a Crown and Public Prosecutor, while the son worked as an advocate for the Madras High Court. Having the need to supervise the local police in a complicated colonial context, the two took it upon themselves to not simply translate the Austrian Handbook, but to rewrite parts of it, or in their words, they had to bring it up to date “for the benefit of Indian and colonial magistrates, lawyers and police officers.” In Madras Presidency, the colonial policing was highly centralized, and supervised by the magistrate-collectors, who, were also responsible for administering the district courts.2 It was against this backdrop, the two translators – John Adam and his son J. Collyer – worked as barrister-at-law in Madras. As the title page of the Handbook also made clear, the father was a Crown and Public Prosecutor, while the son worked as an advocate for the Madras High Court. With such specific need to supervise local police in a complicated colonial context, the two did not simply translate the Handbook, but as they announced in the preface, they had brought it up to date, “primarily for the benefit of Indian and colonial magistrates, lawyers and police officers.” 3
The rewriting did not end here.
Following the first edition published in Madras in 1906, the second edition, finally came “back” to the British soil, and was published by Sweet and Maxwell in London in 1924. Catering the taste of a more “civilized” British audience, J. Collyer Adam
decided to delete the majority of Madras-specific content and illustrations, which, unfortunately, included the Indian House drawing. Hence, in the subsequent British editions, which were many, Scene II was never to be seen again.4 This kind of sanitizing and localizing operations went beyond the simple removal of colonial residues. In the 1934 edition, for example, Norman Kendal, the assistant commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department at the Metropolitan Police in London, added British examples and references into the Handbook, marking the beginning of a new trend of “scientific policing” in the UK. Then, in the post-war edition, the editor ended up taking out the problematic chapter about "Wandering Tribes," that had a clear racist undertone.5
Thanks to Adam and Adam who first took the initiative to translate and partly rewrite the original book, which as it turned out, was the 4th edition in its original language,6 the English Handbook and its many siblings, had essentially turned into a living archive, where legal and judicial powers of various kinds left traces as they decided what to pick up and leave out. As for the techniques that were caught up in the handbooks, they morphed as they created new tensions with the local protocols, inscribing new rules, (imperial) biases, and progress too as they went.
Dr. Prof. Hans Gross and the Criminalistic Institute
As the English editions strayed further and further away from its Austro-Hungarian origin, the real author — Hans Gross, had become a shadowy figure, who was solely known to the English-speaking world through the colonial reproduction of his sets of techniques.
In a sense, often only addressed as the “father of criminology” and with no further information provided in the English context, an ideal image of Hans Gross would be an en face portrait, in which his face and torso were posed at a slight angle, while he looks at the camera in an inoffensive but expressionlessly way. (Fig. 1) In the archive of
Hans Gross Crime Museum, however, an alternative portrait of Hans Gross is still in existence. Under the caption of “Prof. G. in the identification office of the Vienna police department on October 14, 1901,”7 Hans Gross can be seen, sitting inside an elongated office, by a dark, wooden carrel. In it, Gross, directed by a standing office clerk, looks dead straight into the camera, slightly concerned. (Fig. 2)
Just three years prior to when this photograph was taken, in 1898, at age 51, Hans Gross ended his 23 years of service at the Graz High Court – where he worked many jobs — a lawyer, an investigating magistrate, and a judge. The same year, Gross started his full-time teaching career at the Chernivtsi University, as a professor for penal law. It was, however, not ideal — Gross originally wanted to teach at the University of Graz, so that he could keep taking care of the collection of crime documents and crime objects he put together in his Crime Museum, which at the time, was temporarily housed at the local court.8 Nevertheless, the teaching opportunity at Chernivtsi and later in Prague, marked the beginning of a highly productive period of Hans Gross’s life. Between 1898 and 1915 — the year when he passed away, Hans Gross devoted all his energy and time to build an intuitional framework, where the interdisciplinary discourse could take place among judicial professionals and scientific experts, which would then feed back into his attempt of establishing the criminalistics as a separate field of knowledge, outside of the criminal anthropological playground.
As a criminalist, who was driven by a sense of justice and a natural distrust of the criminal “class,” Hans Gross was, by no means opposed to
the ongoing “development” in the field of criminal anthropology. Rather, like Gross’s second portrait illustrates, he was curious about the work being done at the “Identification Offices” by the ImperialRoyal Police,9 which at the time adopted the Bertillon method to capture the criminal portraits and anthropometric data.10 Though, Hans Gross did express a different kind of concern, in the first volume of his criminalistic journal, Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, Gross wrote:
“Criminal anthropology has experienced a peculiar treatment and also peculiar destinies, especially through the efforts of the positivist school, because it was understood, taken too narrowly, from the very beginning as the doctrine of the physical and mental peculiarity of criminals. […]
Today we know what a crime is, but nobody has told us so far what a crime means. We do not know which crime, which motive, which repetition makes a criminal in the scientific sense. As long as we do not know this, we cannot speak of ‘characteristics of the criminal ” 11
With this, Hans Gross carved out a critical space, where the field of criminalistics, had to do with the investigation of crime itself, rather than to do with the study of criminals and the criminal behavior — these are tasks are criminal anthropological. In Gross’s words:
“…we can look for peculiarities from the facts, from the crimes, we can analyze the action itself, we can count and weigh phenomena, we can compare them with each other and look for their reasons...” 12
Organically, the criminalistics had redirected the judicial attention back to the site of crime scene and the problems of its mediatic captures. Such was the context in which the crime scene drawing techniques was first theorized and put into a dialectic tension with other forms of crime media, particularly photography, in Hans Gross’s original Handbuch. In between 1898 to 1915, the crime media knowledge was being constantly produced, argued, collected, and circulated through the imperial, criminalistic network Gross and his colleagues created, which tended to circulate back into his criminalistic-institute-in-themaking.
1. Gross, Hans., & Adam, John., & Adam, J. Collyer., Handbook, 1906.
2. Adam, Alison, A History of Forensic Science: British Beginnings in the Twentieth Century, 2016, PP 68.
3. Gross, Hans., & Adam, John., & Adam, J. Collyer., Handbook, 1906.
4. Interestingly, the first American version, published by Lawyer’s Co-Operative Publishing Company (New York) in 1907, was a direct copy of the Madras edition, and as a result, in the later US Handbook editions, the Madras contents were kept as it was.
5. Adam, Alison, A History of Forensic Science: British Beginnings in the Twentieth Century, 2016.
6. Ibid.
7. The original title was in German as, “Prof. G. im Erkennungsamt der Polizeidirektion Wien am 14.10.1901.” https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:km.6153/ sdef:LIDO/get?mode=object&context=context:km.kat.32
8. Gross had a particular vision for the Crime Museum, he expected it to be an educational aid only open for the professionals and kept the public away from its violence nature. It could be seen as Hans Gross’s particular crime media logic, which I termed it, the Crime Museum Media Logic
9. The history and practice of these police identification offices is covered by Scenography I and Scenography III
10. More on this in Scenography I
11. Gross, Hans, “Aufgabe und Ziele,” Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik v.1, 1898-1899.
12. Ibid.
Scene II
The Old Perspective Drawing
Immediately, the blood, depicted in a jarring red, took the center stage of the drawing.
Such bold use of color, at times intentionally drawn with a messy brush stroke, recreates the shock as one might have experienced first arriving at the scene.
Only after perceiving the redness, the depth of the room began to come in. Drawn in a monochrome, suggesting its secondary role — a setting for the bloody scene in the foreground, nevertheless, the room itself is well articulated. Light and shadows are rendered carefully by different shades of ink wash, conveying nicely the spatial-temporal depth of the room interior. The next layer to take notice is the handwriting. Two systems of
annotation seem to be at play here: the numbers 1-7, represent the body -places, corresponding to the list of names “written” on the wall; the letters “A” and “H” call out the trace-places, the former being the blood smear on the wall, the latter being a yellow puddle on the table and on the floor. With these systems of annotation, it is possible to construct a speculated spatial-temporal sequence of how the crime took place. 1 But even as the image seems to tell a “complete” spatial story, the eyes can’t help but to glance at the casual brush stroke towards the right end of the frame. These squiggly lines had become a strange reminder for an authorship — the crime scene is documented realistically until a sense of doubt took over.
The Prehistory of Crime Scene Drawing in Perspective
While the exact time and place when drawing was first used to document the crime scene is difficult to pin down, the majority of early crime scene drawing excavated by this project dates back to the mid 19th century, right around the time when portrait photography was first introduced to capture the criminal bodies in prison.2 Between the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, Archives départementales du Var presented a temporary exhibition — “Que justice soit faite! Méthodes d’investigations varoises (1811-1958).” Although the exhibition was only meant to focus on the new methods of investigations particularly implemented by the local high court — Court of Assizes of Var, nevertheless, it provided a rare chance to gaze into the early, informal history of crime scene drawing, and the emergence of crime scene photographs that followed.
Scene II is one of the earliest crime scene drawings included in this collection. According to its caption, “plan aquarellé de scène de crime (Bormes, 1855)” the drawing is part of the court files posed against Riquier François. It depicts the crime scene in which the victim was battered to death as he was trying to separate two drunken friends.3 Behind the gruesome story, the drawing reveals that a complex negotiation between legibility and credibility was already at play decades before the crime scene drawing was institutionalized. Earlier, the scene description unpacked how the drawing adopts a realistic (“truth-to-nature”) lens, which rather
effectively “preserved” the fleeting circumstances against in the instability and temporality of the crime scene. In fact, it did a little more than that — the perspective drawing possessed a power that could pull the viewer (jury) into the crime scene, showing not just the circumstances beyond the evidential sense, but its fragility and affect too. On the other hand, the narrative of the crime scene was seemingly conclusively fixed by the two systems of annotation, leaving very little space for the jury to stray away from the police detective’s original sequential theory.
Take the color palate as an example: the draughtsman made a creative decision to theatrically bring out the blood splatters in red by suppressing the rest of the crime scene with a dull monochrome. Interestingly, the monochrome effect ended up copying not directly from nature, but from the nature as if it was seen through the camera-lens. Thanks to this visual trick, the perspective drawing acquired the strange appearance of semi-“truth-to-nature” and semi-“mechanical objective” look. Then, the excessive use of red brought out its theatricality too. As a result, the viewers, in this case jury of the French Court, were invited to see something rather appetizing for their taste — an almost objective crime scene drawing enhanced by an artist’s creative touch.4 In an uncanny way, while the use of perspective drawing signified the beginning of the court taking the circumstantial evidence and the “objective” look of the crime media seriously, the subtle affective nudge like the bloody red ink 5 would no doubt fuel the jury’s call for justice to be done. Effectively, the early crime scene perspective drawing such as this one permitted the detective-artist to simultaneously wield the powers of crime scene documentation and narrative production.
It is precisely in the doubly distorted documentation process, where not only competence and skills had an impact, the aesthetic styles too, a questionable mediatic space was opened up between the reality of the crime scene and its handmade reproduction, where judicial power was eager to conquer.
Though, such dubious objectivity did not raise enough questions on the drawing’s credibility as the perspective angle was quickly taken over by the crime scene photographs in the 1870s. The perspectival image’s spatial legibility, however, is a different but equally precarious problem. As the photograph replaced the perspective drawing, it inherited not only its power and responsibilities, but its issues too. In Scene II, zooming in at the table, one could see a series of numbers annotated around it. As it is explained in the scene description, each number represents the location of a body which was present at the night of the murder. But the bodies were fixed to the table only by fiction, as the single coordinates contain no depth nor volume. It is hence impossible to imagine how the crime scene was occupied in reality. Thus, the problem with perspective drawing is not only in its immeasurability but the fact that it relies on a spatial fiction to operate. In the 1878 crime scene photograph, an equally strange spatial fiction was employed, where the human bodies were photographed to demonstration the locations where key evidence were found in the crime scene. In this case, the addition of human body’s irrelevant height and volume further obfuscated the spatial reality of the crime scene in question.
Theorizing the Planimetric Drawing
The perspectival was not the only type of crime scene drawing emerged in the mid-19th century. One of the earliest crime scene drawings discovered in this project is a planimetric drawing depicting a scene in which a fratricide took place in 1727, Stuttgart. Already, the plan drawing had shown early “scientific” qualities that would later be captured and crafted into an official set of rules and techniques, helping the crime scene drawing make an “objectivity” claim.
In this case, even though the two human figures depicted seem spatially confused and abnormally large (out of scale), the floor plan of the actual architecture had been drawn somewhat realistically, and appeared “measurable,” suggested by the scale bar attached on the bottom of the document — a feature that was to become one of the guiding principles to secure planimetric drawing’s “objectivity.” Unlike the perspective drawings we have seen even in the later period, the planimetric drawing has already imbedded a language of abstraction within. When it comes to the documentation of objects and traces inside the crime scene, it is always already an additive selection process rather than a worrisome deduction procedure. Here, though the rooms were largely left “empty,” aside from the basic information about their “functions,” it does not seem as problematic compared to Scene II where the draughtsman attempted to use the squiggly line to gesture a shadow (or perhaps a texture?). The sense of unproblematic additive abstraction process, allowing information to accumulate was soon to be adopted as another standard for the crime scene drawings.6
Unsurprisingly, after more than a century, the planimetric drawing were not only still in use as a media tool to document the crime scene but gained a comparative advantage when compared to its perspectival counterpart. As illustrated earlier, the drawing in perspective were often filled with exquisite details, on which an affective narrative could be built, the planimetric drawings, on the other hand, relying heavily on an architectural language, proved to be a more legible medium to articulate complex spatial relationships to scale. Subsequently, in the collection of Archives départementales du Var, one can observe a trend in which the planimetric drawing started to dominate the crime media landscape after the 1870s, as soon as the photography entered the scene.
The planimetric’s domination continued and in 1893, recognizing its “scientific” potential, Prof. Dr. Hans Gross managed to institutionalize the planimetric view, and developed it into a “complete” system of crime scene drawings. Fundamentally, Gross’s drawing system was informed by the architectural division of space, which was rather unique compared to the rest of the Handbuch, which was typically categorized by the types of crimes. Such straightforward appropriation of the architectural language revealed Gross’s quick determination in making the crime scene a primary site for the judicial authority to exercise its power,7 and at the same time, proving that the crime scene drawing is technically more capable to be the primary form of crime media, through which the judicial authority could mediate between an objective crime media presentation and a subjective crime narrative construction.
Hence, for Gross, to standardize the planimetric drawing is of the utmost importance. To this end, he developed four types of plan drawing, each addressing a different architectural scale. The first one is the room plan. At this scale, the on-site measurement is fairly easy to acquire, hence the quality of the drawing largely hinges on the abstraction and annotation of objects within the crime scene. As for the second drawing type — the house plan, due to its spatial complexity and unpredictability, the primary challenge has become a matter of how to acquire a consistent and accurate set of measurements — especially when it comes to the thickness of the walls. Then, there is the so-called “environ of the house,” which is used to show the relationship between the dwelling and its surroundings. Here, losing the spatial reference provided by an architectural enclosure, Gross introduced a list of signs — similar to that of the military maps, as a means to considerably abstract the “environment” for the purpose of simplification. And finally, in order to make a planimetric drawing for a “large portion of country,” Hans Gross brought in pacing, another militarized method of measuring a vast landscape.
Hans Gross’s Secrete Love for Sketch
On the practical end, as an avid sketcher himself, Hans Gross saw the drawing as highly desirable — if not the most desirable, not only for its capacity of making “an exact impression on the mind” of the jury, and to replace the otherwise enormous and intelligible file of text-based documents,8 but its usefulness in being an operative tool to aid investigation.
Consciously or not, Gross blurred the conceptual division between the crime scene drawing as a form of circumstantial evidence and the drawing as a subjective trace of the investigator’s thought process.
And it is in his indecisiveness around the contradiction between drawing’s objectivity claim and its operative potential— the latter obviously operated through the re-introduction of subjectivity, Gross ended up making a few rather confusing remarks about the “skilled draughtsmen” and their relationship with the “rough sketch.”
For example, even though he announced, “‘punctilious accuracy of measurement’ may be laid down as a first general and inviolable rule,” 9 he then retracted and explained the rule was only set for the unskilled, as in the case of “rough sketch” drawn by the “skilled draughtsman”: “if well drawn, such sketches will often throw stronger light upon and give more infuriation about the situation than an accurate drawing in which all the details are scrupulously measured to within a fraction of an inch but which as a rule does not give so good a general idea as the rough sketch itself.”10 On the other hand, Gross expressed concerns regarding skilled draftsmen’s
tendency to “draw at least a little artistically, and as a result, the clarity might be lost.” 11
Nevertheless, perhaps out of his own secrete love for using rough sketches to document and analyze crimes, Gross made a final, wild attempt at justifying the usefulness in “casual” drawings done by the “skilled draftsman” like himself — “manual skill and perspicacity may be manifestations of one and the same faculty.”12 One could argue if such forceful connection between the skillful hand and the sharp mind is completely baseless or not, nevertheless, in the conceptual space between being vaguely useful and vaguely problematic, the rough sketch in perspective is temporarily put on an institutional probation thanks to Hans Gross’s imposing defense.
1. From what could be read from the handwritting in the Bormes drawing, the numbers marked the victim, killer’s, and witnesses’ locations within the room in the sequence of time.
2. Jäger, Jens, “Photography: a means of surveillance? Judicial photography, 1850 – 1900,” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 2001, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2001), pp. 27-51.
3. Archives départementales du Var, plan aquarellé de scène de crime (Bormes, 1855)
4. Graybill, Lela, "The Forensic Eye and the Public Mind: The Bertillon System of Crime Scene Photography," Cultural History 8.1 (2019). Graybill observes how by the end of 19th century, even as the “circumstantial evidence” gained its influence in court, the French jury still enjoyed a theatrical presentation, as they had been judging based on character and general impressions, not on facts and evidence for the past centuries.
5. Conrad, Edwin, “Color Photography, an Instrumentality of Proof,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Volume 48, Issue 3, 1957. Conrad made an interesting discovery of a case in 1882 in Georgia court, where a colored photograph was deemed admissive in court. Like in the Bormes drawing, the photograph was partially painted with red ink to highlight the blood. In the direct quote from the court, the court announced, “neither do we see any objection to this diagram ‘because part of it was drawn in red ink as suggestive of the bloody deed, and as calculated to inflame the minds of the jury.’” This case some insights into how the criminal justice system may have yet to recognize the power of the affective nudge in the evidence production process. Hauptstaats Archive in Stuttgart Germany.
6. While the project does not address the contemporary practice of crime scene drawing directly, it should be noted here, that a similar graphic technique is still in use, at least still included in a number of popular forensic textbooks.
7. In Scenography III, this point will be explained in detail.
8. Gross, Hans., & Adam, John., & Adam, J. Collyer., Handbook, 1906. This is a recurring argument latter adopted by Friedrich Paul to justify the use of photography in the crime scene documentation.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Gross, Hans, “Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik,” Vol 7, 1901, PP 81.
12. Ibid.
Scene III
Drawing Blood
The blood is jumping out of frame: first the puddle, spreading evenly on the floor;
then comes the finer grain of the splatters, spraying radially onto one side of the wooden panel.
A brown rabbit, laying on its stomach in the bloody mess. There is a small, subtle dent on its head, testifying the murderous work completed with a rounded, clean, hammer. Indicated by the text, the hammer is exactly 23 cm long, 100 g in weight.
The Unlikely Subject of a MultiMedia Criminalistics Capture
Dr. Eduard Piotrowski, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Forensic Science, is a Polish forensic doctor, whose 1895 book “Concerning Origin, Shape, Direction, and Distribution of Bloodstains Following Blow Injuries to the Head” was the published work on forensic analysis of bloodstain patterns. Allegedly, it had a significant influence on the post-war American forensic experts such as Paul Kirk and Herbert MacDonnell. Scene III is one of the only visual documents included in his book, demonstrating the process of his murderous experiments and the subsequent, observation-based “findings.” 1
Consider the property of blood: it splashes, it drips, it smears and dries, its color changes. The worst part is, it could stick to any surface in the crime scene and at times appear illegible to the naked human eye. It is hence unsurprising when, around the same time as Piotrowski’s experiment, Friedrich Paul and Hans Gross had both taken notice of blood as an unusual subject of crime media capture in their respective works.
Friedrich Paul, in fact, wrote about Dr. Piotrowski’s work in his Handbook. According to Paul, the rabbit experiment was requested by a famous forensic medicine professor Hofrat Ed. Ritter von Hofmann, in order to investigate a well-known murder case of lawyer Rothziegel in Vienna. There is an intriguing detail, identified by Paul, with regards to the property of blood:
“When the on-site inspection was carried out in the evening darkness at the place where the corpse lay, only a large bloodstain was found on the wallpaper, in which, when a lamp was brought, numerous blood spatters could be detected, which induced Professor Hofmann to assert that the perpetrator had struck the bleeding, deadly wound of his victim repeatedly, thus causing the blood to spatter, an assertion the correctness of which was later confirmed by the perpetrator›s confession.” 2
Banking on this detail, Friedrich Paul made an almost poetic claim about the urgency and necessity to photograph blood in the crime scene — “just as, for example, the painted names of ships in the harbors, which are not visible to the observer's eyes, become visible on the photographic plate, the color of the bloodstains and thus the bloodstains themselves appear as soon as the object is photographed.” 3
On the other hand, knowing and applauding the use of crime photography as a necessary means to document the crime scene, especially, as a superior extension of the human vision, to liberate it from its biological limitation, Gross nevertheless stressed the adoption of a multi-media approach, in defense of the hand drawing:
“Every image without an explanation is lifeless; and they must be sketched because a photograph, in spite of its accuracy, does not always produce the desired impression. A photograph produces everything and the points of which the attention is desired to be drawn are often less visible and less to the front of everything else than they ought to be. A photograph is, in such cases, very desirable, but it should never be permitted to replace the hand sketch.” 4
But for fist time, prompted by the great anxiety surrounding the fragility of blood-related evidence, Hans Gross had to admit the inevitability of the single media — drawing, to be placed in competition with a multi-media economy of crime media documentation, in which the drawings, photographs, and text-description were placed in a dynamic tension with each other, forming a strong media representation of a set of evidence rather than isolated scenes.
As he summed up, in the new crime media landscape, when it comes to a bloody crime scene: “the safest plan to follow is, first describe, next sketch, and lastly reproduce from nature.”5
1. Piotrowski, Ed., Ueber Entehung, Form, Richtung und Ausbreitung der Blutspuren nach Hiebwunden des Kopfes, 1895.
2. Paul, Friedrich, Handbuch der kriminalistischen Photographie für Beamte der Gerichte, der Staatsanwaltschaften und der Sicherheitsbehorden 1900.
3. Ibid.
4. Gross, Hans., & Adam, John., & Adam, J. Collyer., Handbook 1906.
5. Ibid.
Eyes, Bodies, and Power
Cameraman in the Crime Scene
Out of the police photo studio, into the crime scene. Judicial Authority, Friedrich Paul, and Alphonse Bertillon’s attempted to reclaim their judicial power by the performative institutionalization of the forensic “eye” and the production of “completely correct” crime scene photographs.
Scene I
The muddy road that cuts across the frame. A lush line of wild bush follows.
There is barely anything detectable in the scene to pin the demonstrative act to a real place, unless if one squints the eyes — a faint contour of a tower and pitched roof may emerge from far beyond the roadside bushes, giving just a hint of reassurance — a town or a city maybe near.
Meanwhile, the physical height is established thanks to the cameraman, whose body is nervously lifted from the ground by an impressive tripod. Compared to the amount of photographic space packed in by the monstrous tripod-ladder, the camera seems ornamentally insignificant.
Following the line of vision of the camera, a “dead” body can be seen, cradled by the bushes around it. Its dark suit echoes the color of a small forward facing travel case, posed at the foot of the ladder.
Everything seems to be in its rightful place.
The Bird’s Eye View Apparatus
Scene I is part of a photographic demonstration series collected by the Hans Gross Crime Museum with the following description attached:
“Photography, demonstration by the ‘Hamburg Identification Service’, ‘Apparatus for photographing from a bird’s eye view.” 1
A few other photographs in this series share the description. So, uncoincidentally, the photographer, assistant, tripod, and even the setting itself can be found traversing freely through one image to another: the “dead” body that is waiting to be captured by a camera shooting from above (Fig. 2), is holding the “monstrous” tripod in another (Fig. 1), while the same camera man attempts the same photographic angle. It is unclear whether the description was added after the fact by the Crime Museum archivist or came with the photographs,
straight from the Erkennungsdienst Hamburg. The photographs are also undated. But it is possible to trace them back to at least before the year 1900, when Friedrich Paul included Scene I in his photographic Handbook, as Figure. XXIX. Though, one thing is undisputed — the Hamburg Police Headquarters had adopted the so-called “apparatus for photographing from a bird’s eye view” as a key piece of crime media technology for documenting the crime scene.
In fact, this (sometimes) uncomfortably large apparatus had already made numeral appearances in the 1909 Dresden Photographic Exhibition. 2 For example, in Dresden Police Headquarters’ display booth, a “body” could be seen in the subjugated position on a podium, pointing by a camera from above. Berlin Police Headquarters showed off the apparatus too (Fig. 3)— its massive size could be easily spotted in the photo studio, right next to a classical Bertillon Apparatus.
The mechanism of a Bird’s Eye Apparatus is simple. Different from the Bertillon Apparatus that requires a fixed spatial configuration between the pose chair and camera, the Bird’s Eye View Apparatus is essentially a camera mounted onto a slightly elevated tripod. There is no precision hardware like the headrest or side mirror to confine the photographic subject. Compared to the process of taking criminal portraits with a B. Apparatus, “it is more difficult to take photographs of crime scenes, of objects of fact, and taking photographs to discover criminal act,”3 as Friedrich Paul commented. Indeed, the flexible configuration of the Bird’s Eye Apparatus burdened the cameraman with a new set of challenges, whose
photographic subjects were the often-unbounded space in between the dead body and the crime scene.
As the camera and its operator were both set free from the top-floor police photo studio, the “structural objectivity”4 promised to the criminal portrait photography by a system of control that included a mechanical apparatus, a set of protocols of capture and an architecture that stabilized the flow of body and light, was lost all at once. In fact, the camera man’s new task outgrew even the name of the office — “Identification Service”— that he worked for. Without such a mechanical-bureaucratic system to lean on, the camera man was in a precarious situation: not only did he have to figure out how to take a meaningful, useful crime photograph, under the unpredictable spatial constraint and lighting conditions of the crime scene, but he would also need to carefully restrain his own will and subjective impulse in order to create an objective capture.
Under these new circumstances, the series of staged photographs demonstrating the Bird’s Eye Apparatus could be seen as Hamburg Police Headquarters’ attempt at answering a burning question — what kind of new photographic languages should be used to discipline the cameraman, while simultaneously assign unsuspicious meanings to the documented crime scene?
Theorizing the Bird’s Eye
The Bird’s Eye is a fuzzy concept. If anything, the one demonstrated by the Hamburg Police is a surveillant vision of a bird resting on a branch — a view that could only be made relevant when compared to a human vision closer to the ground. Even though the Bird’s Eye Apparatus is technically incapable of capturing a true aerial view of a flying bird — in Fig. 2, for example, the tripod could only elevate the human eye by less than a meter — such a slight elevation seems to have packed enough unfamiliarity in the photographs to make it appear more automated and neutral, in the eyes of the German and Austro-Hungarian police that is.
The popularization of the Bird’s Eye View came at a moment when the camera’s powerful promise of “mechanical objectivity” finally began to attract scrutiny. The question of how to achieve a truthful capture had become significantly more complicated. Now that the blank backdrop in the B. Apparatus was dropped, all that space and details of the crime scene suddenly rushed into the frame. It was in the uncanny space between a perspective angle that recalled a familiar human eye view and one that simultaneously challenged it with a degree of optical distortion, the cameraman’s self had become a new site of debate and bureaucratic discipline.
In a sense, what the Hamburg Police attempted to achieve by adopting the Bird’s Eye Apparatus was not the elimination of human vision, but the aesthetic cleaning of the camera man’s subjectivity. The Bird’s Eye View was effectively a
structured aerial vision that put the camera man under surveillance through its ever so slightly unfamiliar, perched perspective angle, one that predicts the future militarization of the view in WWI.
1. Photography KM-F, 2-2, “Fotografie, Demonstration vom "Erkennungsdienst Hamburg", "Apparat zum Photographieren aus der Vogelperspektive,” Hans Gross Crime Museum.
2. See Scenography I for more details on this exhibition.
3. Paul, Friedrich, “Handbuch der kriminalistischen Photographie für Beamte der Gerichte, der Staatsanwaltschaften und der Sicherheitsbehorden,” 1900.
4. Daston, Lorraine., & Galison, Peter. Objectivity. 2007.
Scene II
Body in Distortion
A dead body of a woman, lies face-up on the ground, forming a dark triangle.
By her side, a large stone with sharp edges rests suggestively. In the far end of the scene, her face intersects with the line of vision at such a small angle that it is only visible enough to see a trace of violence. A dark line drips across the cheek — either a cut, or a trail of blood.
Her feet, on the other hand, are well-depicted in the foreground. One can easily make out even the unique shape of the sole.
The scene is cut off from above, leaving very little space for the eye to drift beyond a meter or two from where the body falls. There is no sky, no vanishing point neither.
But with the few hints there are — two faint lines on the uneven ground, a wall made from wooden planks that gives ever so slightly a space for speculation, and the triangular contour of the body, an unbeatable fact is established — the perspective angle has conquered the crime scene.
From the bird’s eye to God’s eye:
The Dead Body “Escapes” the Crime Scene
Halfway into Friedrich Paul’s Handbook, Scene II was presented as “Figure. XVII”, addressing which Paul wrote:
“When recording the scene of a crime, it will sometimes be unavoidable to take the errors of the lens into account. We see such an effect of the lens in the following picture, which we owe to the Hamburg police authority.
The corpse itself, whose parts closest to the apparatus are noticeably enlarged, is less of a question here. Although one can easily recognize the lust murder from the position of the corpse, here it is essentially a matter of the surroundings, which are illustrated by three other photographs, which unfortunately were able to find a place here."1
Friedrich Paul intended to introduce Scene II as an example of how the “errors of the lens”2 would distort the photographic subject, so that he could then use it to support a new photographic angle he claimed to have invented — photographing the dead body from the above. However, it seems that even as Paul attempted to undermine such a “casual” photographic angle, he nevertheless made remarks to defend the productivity of the “distorted” photograph. Paul’s seemingly dubious comment signified an inner struggle as he tried to conceptualize a “new” crime scene photographic angle, particularly, focusing on the dead body.
The dead body (or corpse) as a crime media subject is a judicial invention. While addressing “corpse” in an uncomplicated relationship with “evidence”, Anthropologist Zoë Crossland points out the similarities between corpse and corpus, with which she expands the meaning of corpus to include not just a body, but “a collection of facts or objects, as in a corpus of material, evidence, or knowledge.”3 The expanded definition takes the concept of “dead body” one step closer to the legal definition of corpus delicti. In Latin, the latter literally means, “body of the offense,” instead of the “murder victim’s body.” In the Western Law context, however, corpus delicti addresses to “the fact of a crime having been actually committed.”4 And hence, in the case of murders, the dead body is undoubtedly the best evidence that would count towards corpus delicti. Borrowing Crossland’s words again:
“The semiotic density of such apparently simple combinations makes human remains seem particularly powerful in their ability to make claims materially and apparently with little or no “representational” or metaphorical context.”5
So, as the dead body best testifies the very crime inflicted on itself, it powerfully incriminates the offender too. In this sense, the two bodies — the victim and the criminal, are hence permanently bounded by the action of crime. In fact, their mediatic fates mirror each other as they are respectively captured by the police: both begin with a form of forced “removal” from the crime scene (or the latent crime scene) and end with a violent photographic capture that refuses a perspectival representation.
For Friedrich Paul, by claiming to have invented the camera angle that captures the corpse directly from above, which would create, in his words, “the completely correct recordings,”6 consciously or not, he managed to symbolically “remove” the dead body from the crime scene — as the picture plane aligned perfectly with the ground plane where the body fell, the crime scene collapsed into a twodimensional backdrop, not dissimilar to the one used for capturing the criminal portraits in the previous Scenography.
Paul did not shy away from reminding his colleagues that he was the first to come up with the idea — “at my suggestion, Hamburg had the first ladder tripod for recording corpses and objects from above,”7 though, it never occurred to him that he should claim a new name for his special camera angle. As a result, the Recognition Service Office of
the Hamburg Police, as seen in Scene I, simply added the new angle to their Bird’s Eye Apparatus. It is not until decades later when Alphonse Bertillon’s crime scene photographs were rediscovered alongside with his popular criminal portraits (“rogue gallery”), did the same, strange angle of the corpse caught attention. A new name — the “God’s Eye View”— ends up forever associated with Bertillon’s name instead. 8
The expert’s multi-media POV:
Drawing Body in Parts
The new angle immediately received criticism. One loudest voice came from the famous AustroHungarian forensic medical expert, Prof. Dr. Kenyeres Kalozvár:
“Totally to be rejected are all the monstrous ladderlike tripods devised for photographing corpses lying in a prone position from above. — Such shots always seem quite unnatural — for nobody is used to looking at things from a bird›s-eye view. The photographer must endeavor to reproduce the objects as they usually appear to our eyes; he should therefore always place his apparatus as horizontally as possible and his lenses at eye level.” 9
Prof. Dr. Kalozvár is, as Friedrich Paul acknowledged, “an equally competent forensic doctor as a photographer.” Much of the essay where this particular critical passage is found dealt with photography and other forms of documentation. Just as the title i`ndicated, the essay was based on a lecture he gave at the “76th Traveling Meeting of Physicians and Natural Scientist in Breslau,” and the
main topic of the lecture, interesting enough, is on the “gathering of educational and evidential material in forensic medicine.” 10
As the primary task for forensic medical doctor was the examination of the dead body, naturally, it was the most important form of “educational and evidential material in forensic medicine.” So much so that, as Kalozvár described, even though “the number of judicial dissections varies between 250-300 per year, […] we still suffer from a considerable lack of corpse material in particular.”11 Effectively, the concept of the dead body has been further expanded from a judicial subject (as part of the corpus delicti) to a medical-judicial subject, which in turn altered the form of vision it commanded. So, to understand Kalozvár’s seemingly outdated criticism of Paul’s “God’s Eye View” and his strange attachment to the “truth-to-nature” claim of a Human Eye View, one must first look into what the new medical-judicial vision really entailed.
According to Kalozvár, there were four medias available for the documentation and “preservation” of the corpse, namely: the description, the collection of body parts, drawings, and photographs. The first two were self-evident. As for Kalozvár’s photographic techniques, Friedrich Paul described, “all the exemplary photographs I have seen at the Forensic Medical Institute in Budapest, are taken from one-sided point of view of the forensic doctor’s, who is satisfied as long as he is able to see and describe the corpse, the details might have even been photographed separately.”12 While Paul’s words should be taken with a grain of salt, the “casualness” felt in Kalozvár’s attitude towards the photographic
medium concerning the dead body as a subject was very much present in Kalozvár’s own writing. To understand the where did such attitude originate from, it is necessary to look at Kalozvár’s extensive but flexible adoption of drawing in documenting the dead body.
Kalozvár’s “drawings” could be categorized into two types: the first one was drawn by plotting dots to represent the distances between objects, which is measured by a tape during “on-site” inspections13; the other, is a trace, taken directly from injuries or bloodstains during “on-body” examinations. But unlike Hans Gross who preferred drawing or Friedrich Paul who prioritized photography, Kalozvár treated the drawing and photography as two complementary medias, in between which the subject of capture could move somewhat freely, so long as the measurement and scale were respected. For example, Kalozvár recommended a scheme of making accurate anatomical diagram from photographs that “everyone can easily make.”14 Once the diagramcanvas was made, all of the injuries found (by the forensic doctor) during close examinations could then be transferred directly on the diagram with a soft pencil. As for the drawing of injuries, sometimes directly produced by tracing “on-body” onto a celluloid film. In both examples, the documentation of the injuries was literally completed by blurring the line between drawing and photography, as the subjectivity and the Human Eye View of the forensic doctor was intentionally introduced to the document in the disguise of medical “findings.”
Kalozvár’s dead body was hence no longer conceived as a whole, but dissected by the medical
observation, and abstracted into only body parts, on which the offense could be accounted for. What F. Paul saw and felt greatly unsettled by, as the details of bodies being “photographed separately,” was but part of the same abstraction/dissection process, through which the dead body was indeed not only completely removed from crime scene, but its unit of photographic capture was radically altered.
A power struggle: who controls a poor image?
In a paradoxical way, Paul criticized Kalozvár’s photographic techniques, and by extension, the drawn diagrams of injuries, for not taking into consideration the importance of showing the “exact position of the corpse with its surroundings” to the jury. In the meantime, Paul recommended using the “God’s Eye View” to document the dead body, which — as argued earlier — tend to collapse the crime scene into an abstract backdrop, hence symbolically removed the dead body from the crime scene too. Such conflicting desires of simultaneously abstracting the crime scene while resisting the dead body’s complete removal, was also found in Hamburg Police’s demonstration photos. One of the three images, where the camera man was demonstrating the “dead” body under rest by the “God’s Eye” Apparatus (Fig. 2), was completed in a simulated crime scene in studio, as indicated by the sharp divisions between light and shadow and a literally painted backdrop. Even after the dead body was transported away from the crime scene, the camera man attempted to re-situate the body into a scenographic setting. Such urge to “reconstruct” the scene of death was nowhere to be found in Kalozvár’s conceptualization of the “corpse material” media.
Ultimately, the dead body as a site of mediatic contestation between Paul’s God’s Eye photographic capture and Kalozvár’s multi-media Expert’s Eye View, is a matter of who got to control the meaning of the dead body and how it was achieved through the re-organization of crime media. What Paul identified as the potential risk of creating “completely
wrong pictures” due to the lack of mechanical understanding from “human eye and imagination,” was in fact, an affective response, materialized by his personal experience as an investigating judge. As he put it:
“When so many people take part in the discussion of the facts, according to their various professional backgrounds and educational levels, each in their own particular way, it is not surprising that the jury box occasionally asks questions or makes comments that often add a whole lot to a criminal case give an unexpected direction, are even decisive for the final outcome. […] Now that forensic photography has to reckon with this factor, it is evident that we must strive to present a perfectly correct representation of the object through photography.” 15
In other words, the narrative constructed by the investigating judge (or the police detective) could potentially be put in danger if the photograph failed to perform its truthfulness or “truth-to-nature”-ness (in Paul’s words) in front of the jury. This, however, was less of an issue for the forensic medical doctor like Kalozvár, whose expert status authorized him to speak on be half of the dead body even if the representation appeared to be “casual,” “subjective,” or “poor”.16 The degree of freedom could be sensed as he expressed more concern over the problem of (ethical) clarity rather than credibility (trust):
“Although we doctors are not directly responsible for the verdict, there are cases where the fate of a suspect is decided solely on the basis of the knowledge and conscience of the experts. One cannot imagine an uncannier feeling than that which must befall the expert when doubts arise within him as to whether his statements have been correctly understood. We must therefore endeavor to enlighten judges and parties as far as possible, to give them the means to judge our report. The best way to do this is to demonstrate ad oculos.”17
On the other hand, as the dead body was being snatched away by an expert medical-judicial vision, Friedrich Paul’s stubborn defense of the God’s Eye View could be understood as judicial authority’s attempt to re-instate the control over the dead body by fixing its physical entirety to the crime scene ever so slightly.
In the grand scheme of things, this was only one instance in which an expert began to encroach on the judicial authority’s control over the meaning of crime. By the end of the 20th century, experts of various kinds, such as botanist, toxicology, physicist, and microscopists, began to show up in the European courts, each of them brought along a small black box of knowledge, ready to impress the jury. A consolidated judicial authority which used to belong to the police detectives and the examining magistrate was no longer accepted as a given in court.
The crime scene — a physical space that was to be first visited, demarcated, and managed by the judicial authorities — had then became the real site (one of the only sites18) in which judicial power could be exercised freely. When explaining why the photographic documentation of the crime scene is essential, F. Paul wrote:
“It happens repeatedly that the court of justice goes with the jury to the scene of the crime in order to create a picture of the fact from our own observation on the basis of the material that arose in the hearing, but we doubt whether in all cases the ideas thus obtained corresponded to the actual earlier conditions.” 19
This, of course, came from a place of reasonable doubt, considering the very nature of the crime scene is not only time-sensitive but also materially unstable. However, on the other hand, it could be seen as a convenient excuse to start removing the jury from the crime scene altogether. In Paul’s words, “a photograph would have substituted this (jury’s visit).”20 Effectively, in restricting jury’s ability to return to the scene, the crime scene as a physical space was held hostage by the judicial authority, so much so that it ceased to exist outside of its crime media representation.
1. F. Paul, Handbuch, PP 39-40.
2. While the project does not explore this idea further, it should be noted here that compared to Hans Gross and Alphonse Bertillon, both of whom would have never admit that camera lens could potentially produce “error.” In fact, Hans Gross even suggested that the seemingly distorted photograph produced by the wide-angle lens only a result of human eye’s incapability of seeing the real space.
3. Crossland, Zoë, “Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential Traces,” 2009.
4. Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th edition.
5. Crossland, Zoë, “Of Clues and Signs: The Dead Body and Its Evidential Traces,” 2009.
6. F. Paul, Archiv. Paul writes, “a few years ago, inspired by a practical case and familiar with the needs of both the examining judge and the trial judge, I recommended photographing from above, I thought I had met all the requirements to the greatest possible extent when I advised noting the lens height and to lay or place measurements next to the objects to be picked up which allow (however only the plane on which they lie or stand) to be measured on the picture.”
7. Ibid.
8. F. Paul, Archiv. Paul writes, “I sent my Bertillon handbook in at the time and wrote both to him and this time to his collaborator Ph. David, my letters always went unanswered. But B. recognized the usefulness of my suggestion, introduced the procedure and developed it into metric photography.”
9. Prof. Dr. Balázs Kenyeres Kolozsvar, “Gathering of educational and evidence material in the Judicial Medicine. Instructions for completing preparations for taking drawings, photographs, X-rays, etc. Based on a lecture given at the 76th traveling meeting of physicians and natural scientists in Breslau.” Archiv für Kriminal Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, Vol. 22, 1906.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. F. Paul, Archiv.
13. Kalozvár did not specify whether this type of drawing is used to draw the body or the crime scene, though according to the procedure he introduced, it aligns with the practice of making the planimetric crime scene drawing popular at the time.
14. Prof. Dr. Balázs Kenyeres Kolozsvar, Archiv.
15. F. Paul, Archiv.
16. The “poor” image here is a reference to Hito Steyerl’s reading of “the concept-in-becoming of the images.”
17. Prof. Dr. Balázs Kenyeres Kolozsvar, Archiv.
18. And perhaps the only other scenario, in regard to crime media, is the police photo studio.
19. F. Paul, Archiv.
20. Ibid.
Scene III
Natural light illuminates the room interior.
Source: two grand windows, one gravely near, the other one comfortable further back. Inside, a decent portion of the floor, or rather, carpet, is rendered visible.
The immediate glance gives no vital information, other than a heavy look –two bulky armchairs, each guards a window; a mirrored closet is equally pronounced.
The hardwood bed, however, seems to have been left unmade in a hurry. By the foot of the bed, a busy side table and a pushed-in chair are equally left unattended. Judging from the large portion of frame occupied by the bed-table cluster, an attention is likely due.
Considering the complexity of scene —an assortment of objects, each with a different texture, all subject to the sharp division between light and shadow to account for its legibility. But the skillful capture in itself is easily left unnoticed, like the authoritative template and the system of grids, violently yet quietly, imprison the photograph.
Towards a Divine Human Eye
Fig. 7 The second part of the demonstration document showing the mechanism of Bertillon's "Metric Photography."
The above is a crime scene photograph, one of the only ones, found in Alphonse Bertillon’s second seminal book on “judicial photography.” Written in 1909, co-authored with Dr. A. Chervin, the
“Anthropologie Métrique”1 was meant to theoretically (and scientifically) perfect the Bertillonage, previously proposed in “La Photographie Judiciaire” in 1890. Naturally, the main subject matter in “Anthropologie Métrique” is the criminal body. On the other hand, the radically new crime scene photographic technique — “metric photography,” demonstrated through Scene III and a correlated planimetric drawing, was presented with an unimpressive length — a mere two-pager.
Bertillon and Dr. Chervin believed that by adopting the metric photography, “one can quickly and accurately reconstitute the geometrical plane of all the points seen.”2 In the ideal situation, the method was meant to save labor, time, and most importantly the potential risk of errors associated with on-site crime scene measurement (usually conducted by the draughtsman), while at the same time putting cameraman’s subjectivity under a structuralsurveillance, enforced by written protocols and the perspectometer template.
In reality, however, the perfect mechanical objectivity achieved by way of “metric photography” is in fact full of technical flaws. The basis of “quickly and accurately reconstitute the geometrical plane” is, in fact, subject to the Human Eye View’s visual limit — what is not registered in the camera’s field of vision would likely be lost forever. For example, in Scene III, aside from the wooden chair3 in the center right of the frame, none of the other furniture has all the points that touch the ground visible in the photograph. This means, the planimetric drawing is really only automatic and accurate when it comes to objects that can be seen directly and completely
from the viewpoint (camera), the rest will need to be readjusted, ironically, by on-site measurement and/ or guesswork. In addition, as seen in the planimetric drawing, at least ¼ of the room was not registered by the scene photograph, all of which is drawn, as the text suggested, “by a freehand.”4 Just imagine what kind of logistic nightmare it would be to create a 1/3 automatic, 1/3 measured and 1/3 freehanded planimetric drawing.
And yet, the seductive scientific appearance of “Metric Photography” managed to hide its major technical flaws in plain sight. With it, Bertillon managed to permanently elevate the Human Eye to the God’s Eye by subjugating the planimetric drawing under the crime scene photograph. Years to come, the metric photographic template was used extensively by the Préfecture de Police in Paris, even for photographs that had nothing to do with the crime scene.5 The “metric photography” had officially become a graphic signature, performing the appearance of “mechanical objectivity.”
In the final iconographic space of Bertillon’s photographic template, the simultaneous removal of cameraman and draughtsman’s subjectivity, turned out to be the glorification of the Human Eye View of a single man — Alphonse Bertillon himself, whose viral crime media logic had illustrated the performative display of judicial control over the crime scene by way of crime media at its finest.
1. Bertillon, Alphonse., & Dr. A. Chervin, Anthropologie Métrique, 1909.
2. Ibid.
3. Interestingly, in the body of text, A’ was selected — the leg of the chair, as an example of how the point is plotted from the photograph to the plan.
4. Interestingly, in the body of text, A’ was selected — the leg of the chair, as an example of how the point is plotted from the photograph to the plan.
5. An example of this is the photographs of the Paris Police photo studios, which were also pasted onto the metric photography template.
Epilogue
Crime Media in Flux
Diving in the last territories where the crime scene documents and the writing on techniques reside, namely, the crime museums, the handbooks, and the newspapers, and last but not the least, the courtrooms, and to investigate, compare Hans Gross’s “Crime Museum Media Logic” with Alphonse Bertillon’s “Viral Media Logic,” to find clues about the state and shape informing the commercial media logic today.
Scene I
were oddly an appropriate spatial allegory to the ideal crime museum Gross had in mind. For Gross, the disturbing visual matter of crime had to be kept away from the pervy public eye. At the same time, the collection should be accessible for students and young professionals in the new discipline of criminalistics. Gross’s crime museum was meant to be an exclusive form of teaching aid, like the delicately drawn illustrations in an expansive textbook.
With the mass-produced silver gelatin-bromide coasted paper,
the positive images can be produced just after a few seconds of exposure. Thousands of copies can be made within two hours when the original print was seized. While Gross was trying hard to formulate a highly insular circle of specialized criminalists and keeping the gruesome nature of the crime scene secured in a museum behind closed doors, Bertillon was working hard on improving the speed of reproduction and distribution of the criminal portraits and crime scene photographs directly sent from the police station to the general public.
Scene III
The Imaginary Courtroom (Installation)
And to imagine a courtroom installation where the Jury is able to see attentively.
Unsatisfied by the limited size of the traditional photo prints, Friedrich Paul recommended a projection scheme in court, which was followed up a few years later by no other than the president Koettig of the Dresden police department, who confirmed that a projection was in fact used for the first time to present an enlarged fingerprint in court.
Archives
Department of Var Archive
Hans Gross Crime Museum Virtual Collection
Crimino Corpus, Museum of the History of Justice, Crime and Punishment
Internet Archive
NYC Department of Records & Information Service, NYC Municipal
Archives Collections
National Archives
LA Public Library
Bibliography
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Scenographics tracks the emergence and evolution of crime scene documentation into the twentieth century, as well as the impact on the manipulation of spatial evidence by competing media –particularly drawing and photography – which inflected and to a degree determined the meaning of crime, its interpretation, and implications. By returning to the original question of vision and spatiality at key scenographic moments in the history of crime media, my thesis addresses how criminal spatial evidence at the crime scene gave rise to a range of secondary spaces and situations — from police photo studio to crime museums. In turn, the work generated by these spaces and institutions has contributed to the mediatic tension between drawing and photography. Lastly, the thesis seeks to expose the mechanism of power behind the production and dissemination of crime media knowledge, made explicit by the scenographics of crime.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSTY CCCP PROGRAM, 2022