Captured: Portraits of Crime 1870-1930 - Flipbook - Page 13
INTRODUCTION
The figures are to be taken ¾ size unless in exceptional
cases where there may be reason for taking them in full.
The negatives will be numbered to correspond with the
Photographic Register, and carefully packed away under
lock and key. Twenty five copies of each portrait are to
be printed and furnished to the Inspector General of
Police through this Office.
Maclean’s direction built on earlier reforms introduced
by the NSW Government in 1867 to improve the management of
its gaols. Then, regulations specified that gaolers keep a
‘Description Book’—‘containing personal description,
religion’ and the ‘particulars of convictions of all prisoners
received’. Now, photographic portraits of prisoners would be
incorporated into description books. Image and information
would combine to record the identity of convicted offenders.
At the time, The Sydney Morning Herald claimed that ‘briefer
or more comprehensive biographies have probably never been
framed’.
While the practice of photographing prisoners was
introduced in NSW in 1871, it had been established elsewhere
two decades earlier. In 1850s France the photographic lens of
the law was aimed at vagrants. ‘Strangers to the city’—those
not known to local constabularies — and ‘habitual criminals’
were the focus in Britain. According to Jens Jäger in his
study of judicial photography and surveillance, these early
practices were more experimental than systematic, reflecting
the interests that particular gaolers or authorities had in
photographic technology. There were both detractors and
supporters of the practice. Some critics drew attention to the
bourgeois taste for photographic portraiture and contended
that its use for the ‘criminal classes’ would degrade the art
form, and, by association, denigrate the respectable classes.
Others thought that recording a prisoner’s face was more about
punishment than administration, as their image — captured in
photographic permanence — would exist far beyond any penalty
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