New Project

Initial Ideas

My initial ideas included ways of showing the general public images of reconstructed crime scenes in order to show the general work of CSI's. 

In researching initial ideas for crime scenes I carried out some research into the oldest and possible originater of crime scene photography - the work of Arthur Fellig (links on right). With the exception of Arthur's work, due to the criminal nature of the images involved there is not really a great deal of work that is accessible or work related to prominent photographic figures in that genre, as this is a very specialised area of photography.

The above shows one of Weegee's photographs at a crime scene. Note the harsh lighting in black and white. Below is a photograph of a modern day Scenes of Crime Officer examining a vehicle used in a kidnap. Colour photography is used today, which although it enables things like blood patterns to be seen, I feel black and white better depicts a crime scene and people do not seem surprised to see a black and white crime scene image, but show surprise at a colour one.

I thought that this was too obvious a route though, and did not really depict that fact that I personally see things in a different way. To do this I realised that I had to show everyday objects and images that people would just ignore and walk past without realising the criminal significance of. During my research many memories of past crime scenes I had been involved with came flooding back as I tried to relate them to everyday objects that I could then find to photograph or reconstruct. For example a photograph I have used - that of an ordinary bed sheet, to me, depicts an item that could be used for suicide. This is because I have attended scenes in the past where such an item has been used for exactly that purpose.

Format

It was important that quite early on that I decided on the format of the finished product. I could then try to visualise what the images would look like in that format and also try to organise the order in which the images were to be viewed. I decided that I would show the images in book format using blurb.com. Using this format would enable me some control of the order in which the images are viewed, which I believe is a crucial factor in trying to acheive the objective of the project.

My target audience, ideally, would be people who have no idea of my background nor have a 'crime' related background themselves and would view the book from front to back with an open mind. To this end the finished book gives nothing away as to its purpose which is why there is very little in the way of any written introduction, and why there are no titles, or explanations with the images. Individual image titles/descriptions are at the end of the book which, ideally, will prompt the viewer to revisit the images.