344
Craven used an elegant horse-drawn photographic
caravan which, uniquely, served as a portable camera
as well as darkroom to prepare his wet-collodion nega-
tives. His photographic activities appear to have been
terminated by 1858 due to a stroke and he died in Scar-
borough, Yorkshire on 25th August 1866.
Ian Sumner
CRÉMIÈRE, LÉON (1831–1872)
French photographer
Born in 1831, Léon Crémière learned photography as
an assistant to the most important photographer of his
time, Disdéri. Crémière opened his fi rst studio at 28
rue Laval and 2 rue Frochot in 1861 collaborating with
Erwin Hanfstaengl, a German photogapher working
in Paris for the aristocracy and people of high society.
The same year, he became involved as a member of the
Société française de Photographie and was a member
until 1864. There he displayed offi cial portraits and
also Opéra sets “obtained with electrical light” and
animals, “study for rapid photography” (from Catalogue
des exposition organisées par la Société française de
Photographie, 1857–1876, Paris: Jean-Michel Place
éditions, 1987).
The publication of the “Album militaire de
l’Empereur” in 1961, photographed with Hanfstaengl,
portrayed the different military corps, a project from
which earned him offi cial acknowledgement and rec-
ognition. One year later, he photographied Napoléon III
hunting with hounds as well as the imperial farms and
became involved with animal photography. His work
with animals was exhibited at the Société française de
photographie between 1861 and 1865 and the “Exposi-
tion canine” of the Tuileries.
As a scientifi c editor, he released several magazines
during the 1860s, specifi cally “Le Centaure” in 1866
which specialized in sports and “Le Petit Sportsman”
in 1868 which focused on hunting. He also contributed
to the illustration of works, the most important of which
was “La Vénerie française à l’Exposition de 1865.” He
stopped working at his studio in 1871, and died later
probably in 1913.
Marion Perceval
CRIME, FORENSIC, AND POLICE
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photographers and criminals exploited the photograph
for illegal activities well before public authorities in-
corporated the photograph successfully into criminal
investigations and legal proceedings in the last two
decades of the 19th century. By the late 1840s, for ex-
ample, there was an established international market for
pornographic daguerreotypes violating obscenity laws in
most countries. Similarly, as paper-based photography
improved in the 1850s, there was an increase in cur-
rency counterfeiting by photographic means, though
the lack of colour and loss of surface details precluded
any widespread activity.
Forensic photography—primarily to identify suspects
and convicts, but also to survey crime scenes and docu-
ment clues—did not come into systematic use until the
1880s, despite numerous isolated efforts dating back
to mid-century. The relatively slow appropriation of
photography for criminalistic and forensic ends, despite
photography’s rampant popularity and rapid growth in
other sectors of society, can be attributed to at least two
important factors. The fi rst was the practical diffi culty
of establishing systemic and standardized photographic
methods across jurisdictions given the signifi cant costs
and complicated processes that the medium entailed
before the availability of factory-prepared photographic
plates. The second was a prevailing uncertainty concern-
ing the legitimacy of the photograph as a convincing
legal document bearing reliable scientifi c content. As
Western legal tradition was primarily text-based, the
new visual language of photography entailed a funda-
mental shift in the approach to the image as evidence,
requiring subsequent changes in jurisprudence, before
the photograph would circulate freely within police
departments and courtrooms.
As early as 1844, inventor William Henry Fox Talbot
suggested that photographs could be used to catalog
valuable objects and recuperate stolen property. “If
the mute testimony of the picture were to be produced
against [the suspect] in court—it would certainly be
evidence of a novel kind,” he wrote in The Pencil of
Nature. In a more far-fetched application, scientifi c
and popular journals throughout the second half of the
19th century recounted experiments photographing the
retinae of murder victims in the hope of obtaining an
afterimage of the culprit.
Despite these examples, however, the principal fo-
rensic use of photography in the 19th century was in
documenting and tracking suspects. The mid-century
fascination with physiognomy and phrenology, both of
which entailed the study of facial features and other physi-
cal attributes as indicators of an individual’s moral char-
acter, fuelled an interest in photographing the “criminal
type” as a scientifi c, rather than sociological, subject. To
this end, in 1846 Marmaduke Sampson’s The Rationale
of Crime and its Appropriate Treatment included an ap-
pendix of engraved portraits of New York state prisoners,
made from daguerreotypes by Matthew Brady.
By the 1850s, police and prison offi cials in communi-
ties in the United States and Europe began photograph-
ing prisoners for “rogues’ galleries” to track repeat