Scene of the crime

Art, in its purest sense, is to create, while policing, is to destroy.

Image credit: He Walked by Night

Policing and art have very little in common. Art often serves as the personal expression of an individual; it holds meaning, it is freeing, it expands consciousnesses and reflects the world around us. The act of policing is very nearly the opposite. Policing is rarely the expression of the individual; it serves only to facilitate the strict rules of oppressive states, and holds very little meaning, or rather, it carries with it a violent history of Colonial invasion and dispossession that upholds Capitalist systems. Policing is forceful, violent, and brutish. While art can be these things it is largely done so as a way to comment on the ideas mentioned above — as is the case with Concretism, which arose in a post-Fascist Europe recovering from WW2.

Art, in its purest sense, is to create, while policing, is to destroy.

And yet, these two worlds cannot help but intersect. No, I’m not talking about someone quiveringly calling “Security!” when your favourite Impressionist painting gets souped or the droves of police procedurals that proliferate on our television screens. Rather, I am fascinated by the ways in which art is often incorporated in the practices of police work itself, how officers of the law and the state can unwittingly create art through, what is for them, just an average part of their job.

Be it a sketch artist creating a pencilled mock-up of a supposed perp, someone taking a plaster mould of a footprint at a murder site, or even a detective noting down his thoughts for playback later on a tiny cassette tape (a precursor to the true crime podcast?), the act of policing becomes an art in of itself visually, sculpturally and sonically.

The 1948 film He Walked by Night captures the art of policing in a manner unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Having disguised a portion of his face at each crime scene, the robber has been seen by a variety of people but only in bits and pieces. Gathering all the witnesses, the police show the room a variety of sketches, breaking down the face into miscellaneous eyes, noses, mouths, and hairs. It's a brilliant sequence of deconstruction and reconstruction as you slowly piece together what the culprit looks like.

But these are the most obvious examples. Where you will find the more evocative moments of artistic creation is in the scene of the crime itself. Murder, suicide, death, dispute, violent encounters, collisions and derailments — crime scenes and their representations present the most fertile ground as locations that hold extreme importance, both emotional and symbolic.

When a police officer walks onto the scene of a crime, it is their job to piece together what happened. The place becomes a temporal zone, a site where something happened here, a violent fissure between life and death, past and future, and this aura carries through in the varied figurations of these spaces. As police create impressions of these places for further investigations, they imprint on these visuals the essence of the crime scene itself.

Crime scene photography is very much about this strange temporality. Police photographs are often about the absences, what's not there, an implied action not present. Men standing around a field in suits, roads vectoring off into the distance, empty rooms and silent backyards. The photographs are very straightforward, used to collect evidence or get the bearing of a space. It is in these barebones ‘noting of the facts’ that we can find meaning.

According to Peter Doyle in Suburban Noir, police photography began as all-encompassing tableaux that served to get a bearing of the whole scene. As camera equipment became lighter they switched to the hand-held Speed Graphic, or ‘press camera’, and we began to see how they saw the world (“We see the gaze itself”). Evidence was now submitted as a series of intimate close-ups that made up a crime scene. These single shots capture both the “restless movements of everyday life” and the “small routines of household life”, yet “the mood of the photos is of the aftermath”, and “there’s nothing to do now but bear witness to what remains.”

Road markings and tire scratches intersecting on a curved street become the “modernist angles, hard-edged shapes”, “converging parallels” and “odd diagonals” that transform gumshoe into “abstract expressionists”. Detectives moving through or merely observing the space become “ritualistic”, “monkish”, and statue-like in the way they do their “duty”. Houses become a list-like simulacrum of “cigarette pack on a table”, “pair of glasses by a bed”, “single shoe”, “dislodged placemat”. If the police are presenting a vision of the world, it is a “relentlessly nihilist[ic]” one.

Teju Cole similarly ponders the way conflict photography captures “domestic objects whose meaning has been altered in the aftermath of a calamity.” In their essay “Object Lesson”, they look at the work of Ukrainian photographer Sergei Ilnitsky, describing a “still life [...] in utter disarray” as objects in a kitchen are left broken and dust is collected everywhere.

“Domestic objects imply use, and Ilnitsky’s photograph pulls our minds toward the now lost tranquillity of the people who owned these items.”

The same can be said of the crime scene. The photos spark us as viewers to ponder the use of the supposed “cigarette pack on a table”, “pair of glasses”, “single shoe”. As Cole writes, “the absence of people in the photograph makes room for these questions.”

Beyond photography, the crime scene has been rendered in glorious detail, albeit miniaturised, in the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” by Frances Glessner Lee. Despite being intended to teach aspiring officers of the law to observe and sift evidence from a crime scene through model mock-ups, these works deserve to be seen less in the context of police departments but rather the gallery walls or curated museum.

Lee’s scenes transform the once fragmented nature of evidentiary photographs into holistic three-dimensional spaces that one can view God-like over, affording the viewer an omnipresence hitherto untold. And yet, one must sharpen their eye, adopt the “gaze” of the detective in order to piece together what occurred. It shifts what was once oblique, flat and archival into an interactive work of art.

Nowadays, the crime scene has gone even further into the realm of the digital. Universities and courtrooms in America and Australia are now using VR technology to plonk students and jurors into the scenes of the crime. Even avid gamers and armchair detectives at home can experience the sensation of mulling over shell casings and muddy footprints in games such as CSI VR and projects by ScanLab.

According to the developers of the unimaginatively named “Crime Scene” for Guardian VR, their technology encompasses everything “[f]rom homicides to road traffic collisions [...] Its extraordinary level of detail captures both the space and its contents in millimeter [sic] accuracy.”

Viewers are now rendered even more ghost-like as we can move about incorporeally through the hyper-realistic and hyper-detailed replicas of actual murder victims homes, presented in all their binary, pixelated glory. While the technology brings us closer in proximity to the scene of the crime, unlike the detailed but miniscule design of Lee’s “Nutshell” series or the impenetrable photograph, they also risk creating greater apathy among those who step into this realm.

What are we then left with? The police are still an oppressive force, and yet these works stir something within me. Cole points to the way these art objects can bring about change “in the core of the sympathetic self.” These works grant us “however modest a degree, some kind of solace.” Regardless of the aims of the police, the artistic impulses of these works inspire hope, one that yearns for change and greater empathy for victims of suffering. Hopefully, it can peek through the cracks of the black and white.