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Photos from the Scene of the Crime
L.A. Police Archives Yield Historic, Sometimes Grisly Images
 Listen to Mandalit del Barco's report.
Detail from photo of body under L.A. River bridge, 1955.
Copyright Los Angeles Police Dept./Courtesy Fototeka
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Detail from photo of Chief William H. Parker presenting Jack Webb with an honorary badge (no. 714) on the set of Dragnet, 1963.
Copyright Los Angeles Police Dept./Courtesy Fototeka
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Detail from photo of mob hit in restaurant, 1933.
Copyright Los Angeles Police Dept./Courtesy Fototeka
CAUTION: GRAPHIC CONTENT
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Detail from photo of female LAPD officers posing for gun inspection, 1966.
Copyright Los Angeles Police Dept./Courtesy Fototeka
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Detail from photo of motorcycle officers lined up for donuts and coffee, mid-1950s.
Copyright Los Angeles Police Dept./Courtesy Fototeka
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Sept. 20, 2002 -- Forensic photographers with the Los Angeles Police Department have been taking pictures since the 1920s, chronicling everything from routine arrests to notorious murders and raids. For many years, old crime scene photos and publicity shots were stored in a forgotten city records warehouse.
But last year, a team of artists and police officers unearthed the negatives and began printing them. For Morning Edition, NPR's Mandalit del Barco explores the archive, now making its way to art galleries around the country.
The Los Angeles Police Department "has historically been linked with L.A.'s famous image-maker, Hollywood," says del Barco. "So it may come as no surprise that the set of the 1950s cop show Dragnet has a cameo in the L.A.P.D.'s photo archive: One picture shows actor Jack Webb, TV's Joe Friday, receiving a police badge" from a department chief.
The archived photos, shot from the 1920s through the 1970s, also captured many other famous and infamous people: John F. Kennedy, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Manson, and silent film star Thelma Todd, mysteriously found dead in her car.
There are plenty of lesser-known corpses, too, captured on film at the morgue and at grisly crime scenes. One of the most striking images is a moody shot of police investigators standing over a corpse at a foggy homicide scene below an L.A. bridge.
Tim Wride, who helped curate the exhibition, calls it "an amazing photograph... . The crime scene is actually this small little vignette under this soaring archway... . That photograph almost looks like Humphrey Bogart could have been the detective -- it's wonderfully cinematic," says Wride, associate curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Other images in the archive evoke the work of gritty New York photographer Weegee. One was snapped moments after a mob hit. "It's like a scene out of a Godfather movie," del Barco says. The two bloodied victims sit at a restaurant booth, slumped over plates of spaghetti.
Rick Morten is a Hollywood photographer who shot stills for the movie L.A. Confidential, and he's a reserve officer for the L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks gave Morten permission to look through thousands of negatives that had been stored in cardboard boxes at the city records' warehouse. Some of the older silver nitrate negatives were slowly decaying. Morton enlisted his wife, an art gallery owner, and others to recover the fragile artifacts.
Lieutenant John Thomas, who worked on the archive, says most police photographers of past eras took liberties, recreating crime scenes and adjusting evidence to get the best shot. "Some of the photos, you can tell they were for evidentiary value," Thomas says. "But at the same time, these photographers had a great eye for art and captured more than what was merely there -- something you don't see today in crime photography."
Del Barco says the L.A.P.D. archive project continues, with the goal of cataloguing 400,000 more negatives. A roving exhibition of the photos may soon be headed to a gallery in San Francisco, and 77 of them are on permanent display at L.A. police headquarters.
The photo exhibit is traveling to a number of U.S. cities in the coming months -- for a listing of locations and dates for future exhibits, contact fototeka_gallery@yahoo.com.
Other Resources
• Los Angeles Police Department official Web site.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art
• Weegee's World, a Web site about an exhibit of the candid photos of famed photographer "Weegee," created by the International Center of Photography in New York City.
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