Scientific police photographs are very rarely presented to the public, remaining stored for many years in confidential files because they transgress taboos when their subjects are violent death and crime. These pictures, taken almost a hundred years ago by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, founder of the l’Institut de police scientifique of the Université de Lausanne, reveal their entire aesthetic dimension while retaining their intense emotional strength. As a forensic science pioneer, Reiss shows photographic skills which are unequalled in this field.
The boundary between reality and the imaginary remains unbroken here. Situated between the acts and their representation, these photographs are filled with unusual emotion due to the dramatic circumstances which they retrace. 120 pictures are presented in this exhibit, produced in collaboration with the l’Institut de police scientifique of the Université de Lausanne, which is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its creation by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss.
Issue of a German family and naturalized as a citizen of the Canton of Vaud in 1901, Rodolphe Archibald Reiss was born on July 8th, 1875 in Gut-Hechtsberg in the Black Forest (Baden). After studying chemistry at the Université de Lausanne since 1895, he obtained his doctoral degree in sciences in 1898. As a member of the students’ society “Stella”, he and Isaac Rouge created the Journal suisse des photographes.
Rodolphe Archibald Reiss is an exceptional photographer in the fascinating but complex field of “scientific” uses of photography for criminal investigation. A destiny which led him– temporarily – to oblivion, because the spectacular images of crime scenes are usually filed in the anonymity of assessment institutes, then after their use in court are condemned to the discretion of archives which are inaccessible to the public A large number of these photographs, of American, Belgian, French, Italian, German or Swiss origin, have nonetheless been published since the 1990s, exhibited in museums and galleries, then sold through the art market. They have sometimes also been integrated into museum collections and given the status of artistic object. These phenomena lead us to question the circumstances of their creation, what they mean today and the concepts which preside over their interpretation in modern times. In order to grasp the significance, it is necessary to put Reiss’s work back into its context and to understand the peculiarities of scientific police photography. We must also speak of the place and time when the pictures were taken and analyze the conditions of their publication, some hundred years later.
Rodolphe A. Reiss - The Scene of the Crime
Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée
CH- 1014 Lausanne
Switzerland
Exhibition open from June 27th to October 25, 2009
Musée de l’Elysée
(c) Rodolphe A. Reiss, Theft with break-in, scene inside shop, Grandcour, March 25, 1907
