2/15/11

Beautiful mugs

The most amazing mug shots I have ever seen. Go here immediately!


Thanks to Laura Levine

9 comments:

  1. Police photographers used to have an eye for photography—who knew!? Interesting compositions/crops.

    Love Walter Smith—these are some James Ellroys begging to be redone. Christ, the hairdos on some of these characters...

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  2. There's an interesting book that uses some of the pictures of the women: see here (http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/2009/01/art-versus-reality.html). They're all from Sydney, Australia.

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  3. These photographs, and the archive of which they form part, have been the subject of several innovative creative projects in Sydney.

    Peter Doyle has produced books researching the cases and histories of those depicted in the photographs, notably 'City of Shadows', from which I suspect these samples are taken.

    Ross Gibson (often working with Kate Richards) has done several art installations and lately an experimental novel using other photographs from the archive as inspiration.

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  4. Thanks JRSM and Jonathan for the background info. I just ordered a copy of the Doyle book.

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  5. So were all of these shot by Walter Tuchin? http://www.hht.net.au/discover/highlights/higlights/archive_gallery

    Some pretty amazing shots that he captured. And that experimental novel by Gibson sounds like a great read: http://shop.hht.net.au/site/Home/Catalogue.aspx?productid=35e7572c6b4f8cc7

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  6. The Walter Tuchin crime scene photos are incredible!

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  7. A lot of photographers contributed to the archive, which covers a long period.

    To give an oversimplified summary:

    Peter Doyle's work on the archive is about reconstructing the associated case histories and biographies, insofar as that is possible. Possibly he also provides biographical info. on the photographers, although I'm not sure about that.

    Ross Gibson's (and Kate Richard's) work, by contrast, uses the photographs for which no contextual information survives to create suggestive and hypothetical scenarios.

    Ross' experimental novel 'The Summer Exercises' features an invented photographer as one of its protagonists, although those looking for narrative closure should be warned that it doesn't have a conventional ending or resolution.

    Unfortunately, 'Life After Wartime', by Gibson and Richards et al, an installation that might be described as an engine for generating narrative possibilities from a database of images and textual fragments, isn't yet available online. But there's some background at www.lifeafterwartime.com.

    One of the remarkable things about this archive is the attitude of its current custodians, who only recently rediscovered its jumbled, damaged contents, and who, as part of their efforts to conserve it responsibly, and communicate its historical significance to the public, invited several artists and writers to use it creatively in whatever way they found appropriate.

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  8. i took these shots, animated them and wrote some music. check it out:

    http://vimeo.com/42180570

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