Suburban Noir

Andrew Frost

Back in 2006 The Police & Justice Museum staged City of Shadows and it turned out to be one of the most successful exhibitions ever mounted by the Historic Houses Trust. The exhibition spawned a hard-back book and the exhibition has been revived for another run [currently on show at the P&JM] – not bad when you consider the content of the show – police photographs of crime scenes in inner-city Sydney between 1918 and 1948. Perhaps there’s a hunger for the dark subject matter of the photos, or perhaps it’s nostalgia for a city that has disappeared, but Suburban Noir at the Museum of Sydney is a fitting sequel.

Where City of Shadows concentrated on the areas around the city of Sydney and the inner city suburbs of Ultimo, Surry Hills and Kings Cross, Suburban Noir casts its net to include police photographs of crime and accident scenes out in the suburbs – from the crowded streets of shopping precincts to the lonely and sun blasted fibro houses next to factories and sand dunes. The deeply unnerving subject takes on a special kind of magic when the images were taken at night – such as in the brightly lit service station in Carramar. It looks like a movie set, or a stage play, but since all these images are of real places and people, their uncanny effect is doubled.

Until April 6

Museum of Sydney, Sydney

http://www.hht.net.au/whats_on/exhibitions/exhibitions/suburban_noir

Pic: Murder scene, possibly Hume Highway, Carramar (detail), photographer unknown, 10 March 1964. Estate of the late B K Doyle. Photograph © Peter Doyle