The Forensic Photography Archive is held at the Justice & Police Museum in Australia and it can be accessed through Historic Houses Trust. The archives contain an estimated 130,000 images created by the New South Wales Police between 1910 and 1960, with many of the mug shots taken on 4-by-6-inch glass plate negatives:

Leslie Rees was convicted of bigamy at the Moree Quarter Sessions and was sentenced to four months light labour.

These images invite interpretation, but I know very little about this archive, or even how it has been interpreted by photographic historians and academics in Australia; or how the interpretations of the archive are connected to 20th century European writing on photography and culture. The mug shot photo books/archives was associated with both “disciplining” the criminal body and more generally, in fixing the modern conception of individual identity. It is also a template for virtually all modern surveillance systems, and fixes the process by which we construct ourselves as surveilled subjects.

The meanings these crime archive mug shots of the 1920s, 30s and 40s release are partly discovered within their mass accumulation of period detail. There is an enormous inventorying of clothing, hairstyles, shoes, ties, shirt collars, hats, the outward layers and wrappings human beings adopt to present themselves to the world. This external detail is combined with a capture of a more personal kind of information that exposes the ways in which the bureaucratically possessed and processed subject reacts to the machinery that seeks to ensnare that same subject in a strategy of objectification. We see this in the waves of louche defiance, cavalier indifference, disgruntled incomprehension and sad resignation emitted from the eyes to the camera’s lens.