[Automobile Murder Scene]

Unknown

ca. 1935 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

This picture is a master class in the aesthetics of the crime photograph. As the writer Luc Sante has noted, photography stops time, while crime photography shows the stopped time of an individual life cut short. The anonymous cameraman (whose shadow can be seen in the image) may have worked for the police but was more likely a newspaper photographer. His editors must have considered this an absolute bull’s-eye combination of titillation, voyeurism, and fig-leaf moralizing that lets readers have their cake and eat it too. Most importantly, the stopped time of the crime photograph imparts a heightened significance to all the details within the frame, which could either be clues or random accident.

Artist

Unknown

Date

ca. 1935

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2008