“Crime is terribly revealing”*…
Victim’s feet hanging on bed, 1934 © LAPD
An estimated one million images taken by Los Angeles Police Department officers and criminologists since the 1920s sit in storage at the City Records Center in downtown L.A. Later this month, 50 of these photographs will be on exhibit inside a fake police station at Paramount Studios.
The second annual Paris Photo Los Angeles has put together Unedited! The LAPD Photo Archive as part of its massive photo fair at Paramount Studios from April 25 through 27. The shots, most uncredited and taken between 1930 and 1960, show black-and-white crime reenactments, forensic scenes, even robbery notes…
Bank robbery note, 1965. © LAPD
Read more at “A Look Through the LAPD’s Stunning Photo Archives.”
* “Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.” – Agatha Christie
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As we stick ’em up, we might offer a tip of the birthday topper to Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, remembering that on this date in 1841, Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”– the first detective story in English– was published in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. Its protagonist’s extraordinary “analytical power” was surely the mold for subsequent detectives, from Sgt. Cuff in The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins’ second hit, and the first detective novel in English) through Conan Doyle’s remarkable Sherlock to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and his “little grey cells”…
Facsimile of Poe’s manuscript for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”