A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (2024)

At first glance, the faded 1903 photograph of Madame Debeinche’s bedroom, bound in the yellowed pages of an early 20th-century album, shows what looks to be an unremarkable middle-class Parisian apartment of the time. The overstuffed room brims with floral decoration, from the wallpaper and heavy swag curtains to the carpeting, chair upholstery—even the chamber pot. A large reproduction of Alexandre Cabanel’s voluptuous 1863 painting, “Birth of Venus,” hangs on the wall. A sizeable unmade bed with a hefty carved-wood frame dominates the scene.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (1)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (2)

Bedroom of Madame Debeinche, murdered May 5, 1903. From this angle,the scene looks unsettling, with the picture askew and the dark stain on the bed.

But on closer look, there is something unnerving about the tableau. The Venus is crooked. A spindle chair lies on its side. And a curious dark stain has pooled on the otherwise clean white linen sheets. One need only to turn the page of the album to solve the mystery, since the next photo captures the grislier sight on the floor behind the bed: the Madame’s dead body.

When the Paris police investigated Madame Debeinche’s May 1903 murder, they began by photographing the crime scene. And while that might seem mundane to anyone accustomed to TV police procedurals, documenting foul play was a relatively novel use of the camera in 1903. Her bedroom remains one the earliest recorded crime scenes, and the Madame herself has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the earliest murder victims preserved in a photograph.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (3)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (4)

Madame Debeinche, dead on the floor of her bedroom in Paris. Her darkening hands and feet are a clue that some time had passed since the killing.

These images now reside in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, part of an extraordinary historical document: a nearly 100-page album of unflinching crime photos from the dawn of the 20th century. It was originally made under the direction of Alphonse Bertillon, a Parisian-records-clerk-turned-pioneering-criminologist who is now largely regarded as the father of forensic photography. While working for the Paris police prefecture, he not only pioneered the crime-scene photograph and its counterpart, the mugshot, but he used his lowly filing job to create the first cross-referenced, retrievable index-card system of criminal data. His work documenting, measuring and categorizing victims and criminals alike revolutionized how photography was used both by the police—and, subsequently, in courts of law.

By all accounts, Bertillon was an exacting and obsessive man who, after an unsuccessful stint in the army, joined the Paris police department in 1879 at the urging of his medical-professor father. He soon turned his attention to the problem of recidivism, a chronic problem in Paris since the record-keeping of convicts’ names and photos was haphazard at best; repeat offenders couldn’t often be identified as such, and thus weren’t given commensurate punishments. Attempts to systematize criminal records before Bertillon—including detective Allan Pinkerton’s “Rogues’ Gallery”—hadn’t been efficient or effective. Less than a year after starting his job, the French police clerk proposed addressing the problem with a three-part system that came to be known as Bertillonage.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (5)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (6)

Clerk-turned-criminologist Alphonse Bertillon pioneered the practice of mug shots taken from the front and the side. One reason: He believed that ear size and shape were strong identifiers.

First, he outlined measurements to map a criminal’s body—things like head width, arm span, sitting height and finger length. Then came a physical description that he called a “speaking portrait,” which included unique identifiers ranging from tattoos, moles and scars to hair-growth patterns and shoulder inclination. And finally, the system called for two photographs of the criminal—one frontal and the other in profile. (Bertillon believed ear size and shape could especially aid in identification.) All that information would be placed onto a single card that could be filed into an orderly, cross-referenced archive that could help police more easily run a check and identify a repeat offender. The system was quickly adopted by the Paris police department, throughout Europe and, before the close of the 19th century, in New York and Chicago too.

In addition to revolutionizing police work, Bertillon’s approach to photography had a profound effect on how photos were understood and used. Believing that the medium was more objective than the human eye, he saw it as a powerful tool in his quest to apply scientific methods to collecting evidence and identifying lawbreakers. But he didn’t see photos as entirely objective, since gazing at a portrait, for example, came with a number of cultural precepts about how and why to look. So to distinguish the mug shot from its better-known cousin, the half-length portrait—and create documentary evidence that would hold up better in court—he deployed his secret weapon: detailed standardization of everything from how a suspect is lighted to how he or she is posed. He also developed a system called metric photography, using a series of measured grids to standardize the scale between photos and quantify both the dimensions of objects and the distances between them.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (7)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (8)

Murder scene, Paris.

By the time Bertillon began photographing crime scenes, his reputation was well-established. In 1888, he had been appointed head of the newly created Department of Judicial Identity in the Paris police prefecture. In 1902, the year prior to the Madame’s murder, Bertillon had been celebrated as the greatest police officer in all of Europe by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, placed Bertillon higher than his own fictional genius, Sherlock Holmes, writing: “To the man of precisely scientific mind, the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.” As his Bertillon system spread, he was lauded with medals and recognitions all around the continent, from France, England and Holland to Sweden and Romania.

As the Metropolitan Museum’s album shows, Bertillon documented crime scenes with the same unflinching eye as he did criminal perpetrators. Some of the victims, like Madame Debeinche, were found in their bedrooms. Others lay in kitchens or living rooms. Some bodies had been abandoned in warehouses or left lying among garbage on a crumbling tile floor. The album shows ransacked rooms, chillingly exposed nude cadavers and close-ups of their ghastly head wounds.

In some cases, the album jarringly juxtaposes images of the dead with photos of when they were still alive. On one page, women are rendered in lovely carte-de-visites (late-19th-century photographic calling cards), depicted as daughters or sisters, as glamorous women once flattered by the beneficial lighting of a portrait photographer. On the next page, their human value is gone; they become corpses, bloody and harshly lit.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (9)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (10)

Bertillon sometimes juxtaposed photos of murder victims with images of them when they were living.

Like the criminals whose bodies were subjected to detailed documentation, victims were recorded with similarly exacting methods at the crime scene. Bertillon developed a system that could indefinitely preserve the scene while teasing out pertinent details that might be used more effectively in court than less scientifically conceived photographs of previous decades.

Using his metric photography grids and hand-drawn diagrams, Bertillon helped clarified the scale of crime scenes and the distance between objects, often allowing inspectors to reconstruct a scene in three dimensions. Though there is only a crude, early iteration of Bertillon’s grid in the Met’s album, more refined examples of the method are housed in the Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris. That collection also holds examples of Bertillon’s use of the grid that recreate the topographical dimensions of an entire crime scene. In one compelling example from 1909, Bertillon mapped three rooms of a Parisian home that was the site of a double murder.

In 1903, he constructed a custom tripod with long legs designed for placing the camera directly over a body. The “God’s-eye view,” as it was called, was meant to survey the scene from above, and the eerily omniscient photos it produced offered a comprehensive view to investigators before they turned to more granularly detailed images.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (11)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (12)

As part of his scientific system of documenting crime scenes, Alphonse Bertillon developed a tripod from which dead bodies could be photographed from above. It was called the ‘God’s-eye view.’ Paris, 1894.

One album page containing six photographs illustrates Bertillon’s measuring and inventorying impulses. The unnamed victim has been propped up to be photographed according to the guidelines of biometric measurement system. Three of the photographs show the anonymous body, one with his hat perched on his head, and three are of objects in his possession: a pair of boots and a pocket watch.

But even Bertillon’s ordered approach couldn’t mask the messy or random details of a victim’s life—the unruly bric-à-brac, the unmade bed, the missing shoe. More than a century after Mme Debeinche’s death, the crime-scene photographs offer specifics about her life—her penchant for floral upholstery, her appreciation of shaggy carpets—that continue to compel the eye. Evident, too, is that the Madame had been dead for several hours before she was photographed, her hands and feet both having begun the unmistakable process of post-mortem darkening.

The images never brought investigators any closer to solving her case. There are no surviving records of either an arrest or a prosecution for her murder.

A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (13)A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (14)

Bertillon invented a way of measuring the size of people and things, and the distance between them, by adding a grid to the photo. He called it metric photography.

Bertillon’s innovations in forensic photography, like his approach to documenting criminals, were adopted quickly. In 1915, New York City, for one, launched its Department of Photographs, to capture everything from crime scenes to the city’s blue-collar workers and the cityscape itself, treating the topography itself as a kind of Bertillon record to be captured and archived.

But by 1907, half of Europe had discarded Bertillonage, believing that the science of fingerprinting (recently refined by Francis Galton, a British contemporary of Bertillon) was a more reliable form of identification, more likely to eliminate the problem of human subjectivity that Bertillon himself identified. Still, the mug shot still endures, as does forensic crime-scene photography.

A macabre genealogy stretches from Mme Debeinche to the reproductions of crime-scene photos that proliferate in true-crime documentaries and dramas today. The very idea that a violent death was worth the gaze of the camera’s lens, its image valued enough to be preserved and archived, belongs to Bertillon. He still haunts the scene of every crime.

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A Look Back at the Crime Scene Photos That Changed How Murder is Documented | HISTORY (2024)

FAQs

In what ways do photographs assist in documenting the crime scene? ›

Interior photographs should depict the conditions of the room, articles left at the scene, trace evidence such as cigarette butts, tool marks and impressions of shoe prints.

What are the 4 ways a crime scene is documented? ›

Photograph and document the scene. Collect trace materials (especially from probable points of entry) Collect low-level DNA evidence by swabbing areas of likely contact. Collect other items that may contain biological evidence.

What is crime scene photography summary? ›

Crime scene photography is an important part of the collection of evidence at the crime scene, as it documents the appearance and location of victims, shell casings, footprints, bloodstain patterns, and other physical evidence and produces a permanent, visual record.

How should the crime scene be analyzed and documented? ›

7 Steps of a Crime Scene Investigation
  1. Identify Scene Dimensions. Locate the focal point of the scene. ...
  2. Establish Security. Tape around the perimeter. ...
  3. Create a Plan & Communicate. Determine the type of crime that occurred. ...
  4. Conduct Primary Survey. ...
  5. Document and Process Scene. ...
  6. Conduct Secondary Survey. ...
  7. Record and Preserve Evidence.

How can photography serve as a method of documentation? ›

Photography has the unique ability to capture and preserve a visual record of the world around us, allowing us to document and understand a wide variety of subjects. One of the primary reasons for the importance of photography in documentation is its ability to provide a record of historical events.

What should crime scene photographs record? ›

Photographs can generally be categorized as those focusing on the crime location, nature of the crime, results of the crime, physical crime scene evidence, and follow-up activity not directly occurring at the immediate scene.

What are the 3 main methods to record the crime scene? ›

There are several methods of documentation: Notes, photography, sketches, and video are all important. Note taking is one of the most important parts of processing the crime scene.

What is the most common form of crime scene documentation? ›

The crime scene investigator documents the scene in the form of still and video photography. Sketches are completed at the scene to illustrate relationships between articles of evidence not easily depicted by photography.

What is the best method of documentation for recording overall observations at a crime scene? ›

Written Reports

A written report will ultimately document all observations and actions taken at a crime scene. Source information for this report may consist of notes, in addition to the photographs and other documents described above.

Why is focus important in crime scene photography? ›

Depth of field, often called the plane of sharpness, is the area in a photograph where objects are in sharp focus. Crime scene and evidence photographs should have as much in focus as possible (a deep plane of sharpness). This is because out of focus areas of a photograph can become issues in court.

What is the basic purpose of crime scene photography is to record the entire crime scene permanently? ›

However the photographer chooses to capture the image, the main reason for crime scene photography is to thoroughly document the entire scene, the evidence, and any areas of special significance to the investigation.

What is the main goal of a crime scene? ›

The purpose of crime scene investigation is to help establish what happened (crime scene reconstruction) and to identify the responsible person. This is done by carefully documenting the conditions at a crime scene and recognizing all relevant physical evidence.

What is documentation in a crime scene? ›

One of the most important of these is documenting the crime scene. Such a process involves photography, note taking and reports, sketches, measurements and recording names of people in charge of collecting evidence, and the dates and times those people were present.

What is the purpose of crime scene search? ›

The goal of this process is to recognize and preserve physical evidence that will yield reliable information to aid in the investigation. Investigators should approach the crime scene investigation as if it will be their only opportunity to preserve and recover these physical clues.

What does a crime scene report look like? ›

The report should contain accurate and detailed descriptions of the crime scene, including the location, condition, and position of the victim, as well as any other relevant details such as the presence of weapons or drugs.

Why is photography important in forensics? ›

Forensic photographers are the memory keepers who preserve fleeting clues like fingerprints, DNA samples, and weapon imprints through precise photography. By immortalising this evidence, they create a reliable record that stands the test of time and strengthens the case against wrongdoers.

How is photography used as evidence? ›

Photography records a moment in time. Nothing is more crucial than time when trying to solve a crime. Evidence must be inspected on-site, then removed from the scene and analysed, leaving the photographic image as the most accurate and permanent record of the event as it was seen.

What are the three photographic stages to document a crime scene? ›

What are the three photographic stages to document a crime scene? General Views, Medium-Range Views, and Close-up Views.

What is the purpose of crime scene photography on Quizlet? ›

The purpose of crime scene photography is to accurately depict the scene without introducing distortion or visual bias.

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