Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at how photography and film has been used as factual evidence in courtrooms. It takes eleven cases studies starting with the invention of metric photography of crime scenes in the 19th century. This is a protocol for representing crime scenes using an overhead camera on a tripod which takes an image of the whole body of the victim as well as how it lies in its environment. These were grisly pictures but drew you in. It then looked at Rodolphe Reiss who introduced the idea of taking close up pictures of evidence which allows you to look in more detail at the object and often shows things which can’t be seen by the naked eye. Reiss went on to be the first chair of forensic science. Most moving was a series of pictures from the Great Terror in Russia from 1937-38 in which 750,000 were killed and 7000,000 were deported. These pictures were mug shots taken against a neutral background of those who were found guil...

Ghoulish but fascinating exhibition at the Museum of London featuring items from the Metropolitan Police’s Crime Museum sometimes called the Black Museum. The first section on the 19th century was set up like the original museum with a wonderful hotchpotch of exhibits from death masks of criminals hung at Newgate, through court room sketches and the old visitors’ book of the museum. I found the room of execution ropes rather difficult as I am against capital punishment and I found the fact that there was a record of who these ropes had killed quite eerie. The main section was arranged with the stories of 24 cases from 1905 to 1975 along one side of the display and cases on types of crime and detective methods down the other side. The cases side was fascinating but a bit cramped. It told the story of the crime and they had a small display case of objects from it. Again it was eerie looking at murder weapons. I was particularly taken by the case local to where I live of Nell...