Captured: Portraits of Crime 1870-1930 - Flipbook - Page 16
CAPTURED
Por traits of Cr ime
187 0 – 19 3 0
has led to a renewed interest in this unique historical
material. Who are the men, women and children featured in the
Gaol Photographic Description Books? What can be gleaned from
their brief biographies? How does the melding of image and
information hint at the circumstances and events that led to
their conviction and incarceration? Where did these prisoners
come from and why were they incarcerated in NSW gaols? What
can their individual stories tell us about the changes and
developments taking place in NSW over sixty transformational
years?
These questions have formed the foundations of Captured:
Portraits of Crime. They have also provided the basis of an
exhibition curatorial methodology that has involved extensive
research within and beyond the State Archives. The challenge of
curating and producing an exhibition project from a source data
set of 46,000 individual records was, at first, a daunting
scenario, and this situation was further magnified by a project
timeframe of just nine months. In order to manage the volume of
data and efficiently review and process the information, a cross
section of 9,000 records was established. These were selected
from Gaol Photographic Description Books produced by minor and
principal gaols such as Long Bay, Darlinghurst, Bathurst,
Goulburn, Parramatta, Grafton, Dubbo, Albury, Berrima and
Broken Hill, over a sample of years encompassed in the 1870 to
1930 period. There was an additional focus on the years either
side of the sixty year period mid-point of 1900.
Seventeen researchers were tasked with shortlisting
individual prisoner cases from the sub-set. Firstly, they
categorised cases according to five offence types as specified
under the NSW Crimes Act 1900: Offences Against Persons;
Offences Against Property; Forgery, Uttering and Currency
Offences; Offences Against Good Order and Petty Offences.
Secondly, they assessed how compelling they found a prisoner’s
description as it exists as a combination of image and
information. This qualitative methodology enabled a diversity of
perspectives to be included in the curatorial selection process.
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