Exhibition: Clue:Cold – Historical Forensic Photography from Genoa

Opening: 27.01.2015
Curated by: Stefano Amoretti, Mino Tristovskij
Exhibition: 28.01. – 05.03.2015

After the exhibition Clue: Cold was shown last year at “Gallery 1885” (London, GB), the “London Analogue Festival 2014” (GB) and the “Analogica 2014” festival (Auer, IT), it is coming to Bolzano in its full scope and with new pictures. Using historical photographic documents that were discovered in the 1980s in Genoa by the collector Riccardo Sezzi, this exhibition is directed at specialists, researchers and lovers of the forensic sciences, police investigations and crime scenes.

The main aim of the research is to present to the public the work of an anonymous forensic photographer who accompanied investigations at the turn of the 20th century, documenting the scenes of murders and suicides, collecting evidence photographically (bullet casings, weapons used to commit crimes, fingerprints, written documents), and cataloguing photographs of criminals and suspects.

Some of the original glass negative plates will be exhibited. The entire collection comprises about one hundred negatives. They are visible proof of pioneer enthusiasm and of contemporary technological developments in the field of forensic science all over Europe: the mug-shot or bertillonage (the name comes from its inventor Alphonse Bertillon from the year 1888) had just been officially introduced as an anthropometric technique for recognition by the Paris police. In England, Francis Galton published his biometrics handbook Finger Prints in 1892.

Supplementing traditional photographic printing techniques – being rediscovered today as “alternative” techniques – with digital image processing creates a connection, with a contemporary aesthetic, between photographic avant-garde and Italy’s justice system at the end of the 19th century.