The Museum will virtually bring to your homes a selection of photographs coming from our archive. Every week you will discover new images.
Judicial photography of Rudolph Archibald Reiss, Lausanne (Switzerland), early twentieth century.
Rudolph Archibald Reiss, gelatin silver prints on cardboard.
Rudolph Archibald Reiss, a trained chemist and photography expert, founded the first judicial photography course at Lausanne Police School in 1902. Photography for him has a role of great importance starting from the inspection, it’s the “artificial memory” of the judge instructor that allows him in any moment to review the state of the crime scene, the dead body’s position and to observe details that may have escaped at a first glance.
In April 1906 Reiss took part in the sixth Congress of Criminal Anthropology in Turin and gave Cesare Lombroso his album of judicial photography from where these two photographs of ferrate shoe soles, created to identify traces, come from. On the left, we can see the shoes of a murderer (Meurtre) whilst on the right those of an arsonist (incendiaire). Reiss most famous phrase cites: “Neither art nor science can develop without photography”.