forensic photography – Tasmanian photographer

Sam Clifford’s crime scene photos on board “Western Empire” 1868

June 27, 2024

The White Star Line clipper Western Empire (1862-1875) was built in Quebec (Canada) in 1862 and sank during a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico in 1875. Photographs of the clipper are rare, if extant at all. They might be found in public collections among the many ships photographed in Australian waters that remain unidentified. Though the clipper Crusader (1865-1898, photo below) was a third smaller than the Western Empire, key areas of this ship, and those areas on board Western Empire which Samuel Clifford was directed to photograph as evidence of an alleged mutiny once the ship arrived at Hobart Tasmania (November 1868), are discernible enough from this postcard if not from the photographs (below) of two other clippers in the Empire series, viz. the starboard side, the masts, the main deck, the poop deck aft, fife railing and life boats in the davits. Clifford’s photographs of the Western Empire, however, if any survived, have yet to surface. … More Sam Clifford’s crime scene photos on board “Western Empire” 1868

Vernacular or art? Nevin at the threshold in 1874

February 18, 2010

The “vernacular” is defined as any photography that is not “art”: postcards, insurance records, passport photos, touristic photos, court documents, scientific images, forensic photographs taken at crime scenes etc etc. Thomas J. Nevin is somewhat remarkable in that his photographic records for the police, especially from the years 1872-1880s, are among the earliest to survive in Australian public collections and that his prisoner portraits are claimed as both art and vernacular photography. His portraiture techniques applied to judicial photography were “artistic” in a way that the mugshots produced by prison photographers in jurisdictions elsewhere such as Victoria & NSW, in Australia, and Millbank and Pentonville, in the UK were unequivocal, documentary captures. Nevin’s prisoner photographs were not only posed, printed and framed as commercial portraits – either soft-focus framing or vignetted with darker backcloths – in some instances, they were also hand-coloured for heightened realism. … More Vernacular or art? Nevin at the threshold in 1874

The first Rogues’ Galleries

July 22, 2008

“The public may not be aware that there is a photographic album at Scotland Yard, in which may be seen the carte of every ticket-of-leave man in the country … One carte de visite is kept in the police album at Scotland Yard, another at the station-house of the division of the metropolis in which he may select to reside, and a third is forwarded to any country district he may wish to remove to …” … More The first Rogues’ Galleries

Prisoner poses: women, children and ticket-of-leave men

October 30, 2007

The pose was not the result of the social status, class and power differentials between photographer and convict, as Helen Ennis suggests (Exposures, Photography and Australia , 2007, pages 21-22), a suggestion which ignores this pattern in Nevin’s technique; which assumes that Nevin was not familiar, nor even friendly, with these convicts, some of whom had travelled as Parkhurst boys with Thomas Nevin, aged 10, and his family to Tasmania in 1852 on board the Fairlie, eg. Michael Murphy; and which presupposes that at the point of capture the convict was cowering under the gaze of a punitive individual such as the Commandant of the Port Arthur prison, A.H. Boyd, a furphy [erroneous story] created by Boyd’s descendants and Chris Long which has resulted in a misattribution, and has misled Ennis into publishing this comment which is coloured by her misconception … More Prisoner poses: women, children and ticket-of-leave men