Around 1990, several tons of negatives were saved from a flooded police warehouse in Lidcombe, a suburb of Western Sydney. Later on, a curator at the Justice & Police Museum and author of crime stories, Peter Doyle, was about to sort them out. For three years he studied hundreds of thousands of prints and arranged them in chronological order, reconstructed the stories of the people shown in them and searched for the names of the photographers. The mug shots of Sydney’s thieves, frauds, prostitutes, murderers, drug traffickers, procurers, fences or gamblers were taken in the years 1912 to 1948. The mystery around the mug shots that will never be solved is the photographers’ identity. No one knows who the police photographs of 1912-1930 were taken by. Perhaps there was only one photographer, or maybe more.

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