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City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948
The extensive collection of police forensic negatives casts a fascinating light on the shadowy underworld of Sydney between the wars.
239 pages, Hardcover
First published February 25, 2007
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About the author
Peter Doyle
75 books23 followersPeter Doyle was born in Maroubra, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He worked as a taxi driver, musician, and teacher before writing his first book, "Get Rich Quick", which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel. He has published two further books featuring protagonist Billy Glasheen, "Amaze Your Friends" and "The Devil’s Jump", and a fourth, "The Big Whatever", is slated for publication in October 2014. He is also the author of the acclaimed "City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912–1948" and "Crooks Like Us". In 2010 Doyle received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 20, 2014
When Peter Doyle began gathering material for this book in early 2003 he resolved to look at every negative in the pre 1945 section of the archive. A year and a half later and with three quarters of the pre-war archive sill unsurveyed, he ceased closely reading all but a few document photographs. As Doyle explains:
“Exterior photographs reveal irreducible truths about the geology and natural history of the Sydney district” - for instance “the snake-infested sand dunes and treeless heathlands, the occasional Californian bungalow built on the white sand which drifts continually across roads and paths.” A Sydney landscape that has now disappeared into history.
“Sydney’s unrenovated social past is similarly revealed. Inner city streets and lanes are frequently unsealed, the sky a smudged, smoky grey. There is an evenly grimy quality to the back lanes, yards, sheds, garages and workshops...Kitchens are cramped and often makeshift looking...the streets and domestic backyards of the inner city are largely without flora.”
The collection includes, shots of streets without cars, car accidents themselves, empty homes (except for a dead body) a deserted hotel, mug shots of criminals or suspected criminals (their clothes and facial expressions in remarkable detail). One of the shots that haunts me is the body of a woman - all you can see is her stockinged, shoeless feet. A large coat has been thrown over her torso and head. She is at the bottom of a staircase and there is blood on the stairs. Did someone shoot her or push her down the stairs?
And what about the man and woman inside their house? There is a pool of blood near her head. His body is diagonally across and on top of hers. It doesn’t look like a murder suicide but then who killed them? It’s hard not to wonder what happened when the photographs you look at are so detailed and immediate. The interiors of the houses are so much more squalid than I expected and dreary but what a minefield for historians and historical novelists. There are so many details to explore - whole rooms and a parade of interesting fashions of those visiting Sydney’s Central Police Station. These photographs are both eerie and compelling. Thank God these negatives were rescued and have now been saved for all of us in the 21st Century to marvel at! As Caleb Williams writes so eloquently in Encountering the Archive:
“The experience of sitting alone in a museum loft disinterring personalities and destinies from brown envelopes covered by faded ink is fundamentally uncanny. And I have often felt a charged communication when an 80 year old mug shot retrieved from a dusty box materialises on the screen once the scanning software has worked it’s magical resurrection. Meeting eyes with this stern, resentful or bored image has given me the sense of having blindly trespassed on, or perhaps summoned up, a departed soul from the ether, with its own incredibly powerful aura.”
I’m sure every reader of City of Shadows will feel the same. I definitely did. Highly recommended for lovers of history.
“Exterior photographs reveal irreducible truths about the geology and natural history of the Sydney district” - for instance “the snake-infested sand dunes and treeless heathlands, the occasional Californian bungalow built on the white sand which drifts continually across roads and paths.” A Sydney landscape that has now disappeared into history.
“Sydney’s unrenovated social past is similarly revealed. Inner city streets and lanes are frequently unsealed, the sky a smudged, smoky grey. There is an evenly grimy quality to the back lanes, yards, sheds, garages and workshops...Kitchens are cramped and often makeshift looking...the streets and domestic backyards of the inner city are largely without flora.”
The collection includes, shots of streets without cars, car accidents themselves, empty homes (except for a dead body) a deserted hotel, mug shots of criminals or suspected criminals (their clothes and facial expressions in remarkable detail). One of the shots that haunts me is the body of a woman - all you can see is her stockinged, shoeless feet. A large coat has been thrown over her torso and head. She is at the bottom of a staircase and there is blood on the stairs. Did someone shoot her or push her down the stairs?
And what about the man and woman inside their house? There is a pool of blood near her head. His body is diagonally across and on top of hers. It doesn’t look like a murder suicide but then who killed them? It’s hard not to wonder what happened when the photographs you look at are so detailed and immediate. The interiors of the houses are so much more squalid than I expected and dreary but what a minefield for historians and historical novelists. There are so many details to explore - whole rooms and a parade of interesting fashions of those visiting Sydney’s Central Police Station. These photographs are both eerie and compelling. Thank God these negatives were rescued and have now been saved for all of us in the 21st Century to marvel at! As Caleb Williams writes so eloquently in Encountering the Archive:
“The experience of sitting alone in a museum loft disinterring personalities and destinies from brown envelopes covered by faded ink is fundamentally uncanny. And I have often felt a charged communication when an 80 year old mug shot retrieved from a dusty box materialises on the screen once the scanning software has worked it’s magical resurrection. Meeting eyes with this stern, resentful or bored image has given me the sense of having blindly trespassed on, or perhaps summoned up, a departed soul from the ether, with its own incredibly powerful aura.”
I’m sure every reader of City of Shadows will feel the same. I definitely did. Highly recommended for lovers of history.
January 26, 2015
contains some truly mesmerizing photos. The text on the artistic context gave me a few good leads for further stuff like this, artists like Luc Sante and Arnold Odermatt, while the text on the historical context of the photos themselves delivers a facinating insight into the life of Sydney's underworld. great stuff
March 24, 2022
Well this is one of those strange odd books I picked up in an op shop and was blown away by it. City of Shadows is a compilation of B&W photos, some with a background story, some without any leads at all which provides a rich glimpse into the Sydney's world of criminals back in the day. Mesmerising yet haunting.
Want to read
December 30, 2010* 30/12/2010 as an aside, anyone catch the new tv advertisement for "Underbelly" on Channel 9 tonight. The photograph on the cover of this book was spliced in amongst scenes from the new upcoming series. A fourth Underbelly series to screen in 2011 promises to lift the lid on the birth of organised crime in Australia.
Based in Sydney in the roaring 1920s, Underbelly Razor tells the story of the bloody battle between "vice queens" Tilly Devine and her rival Kate Leigh.
***********************************************************************
The photographs in this book were mainly taken in the cells at Darlinghurst Police Station in Forbes Street. (see it here).
http://sydney-city.blogspot.com/2010/...
(now it's a community health centre - am glad they didn't pull it down it's listed as an historic building). It's opposite the National Art School which was once Sydney's original goal.
The images are beautiful in an austere sort of way and depict the people of the times in their own clothing. They were asked to pose however they liked apparently unlike modern day police photographs so you can sense the real character of the person.
This is on my wish list because I love photography, but also have a weird bittersweet association with the Darlinghust Police Station. No not that...My first ever dog was a Police Dog from Darlinghurst Police Station. Susie - a doberman but she had a tendency to wander and reluctantly they had to retire her. Somehow my father heard about it and took me to meet her - I was 7 or 8 and remember walking though the building past some of the cells to get to the kennels out the back. The cells in my memory looked like the cells in the photographs in this book. Later I was to go to the National Art School (the old goal across the road) and recall the inside of the station with some fondness. Both the station and Goal buildings particularly are eerie, and supposedly haunted - they did hang people there. Something just leaks out of the stonework & you shiver though I never saw any ghosts while there. The bitter part is later I applied for the job of police photographer at the same station and I was rejected because I was female. Equal rights wasn't in force then - I'd read the Female Eunuch by Greer but I was ahead of my times.. Still I want the book.
Based in Sydney in the roaring 1920s, Underbelly Razor tells the story of the bloody battle between "vice queens" Tilly Devine and her rival Kate Leigh.
***********************************************************************
The photographs in this book were mainly taken in the cells at Darlinghurst Police Station in Forbes Street. (see it here).
http://sydney-city.blogspot.com/2010/...
(now it's a community health centre - am glad they didn't pull it down it's listed as an historic building). It's opposite the National Art School which was once Sydney's original goal.
The images are beautiful in an austere sort of way and depict the people of the times in their own clothing. They were asked to pose however they liked apparently unlike modern day police photographs so you can sense the real character of the person.
This is on my wish list because I love photography, but also have a weird bittersweet association with the Darlinghust Police Station. No not that...My first ever dog was a Police Dog from Darlinghurst Police Station. Susie - a doberman but she had a tendency to wander and reluctantly they had to retire her. Somehow my father heard about it and took me to meet her - I was 7 or 8 and remember walking though the building past some of the cells to get to the kennels out the back. The cells in my memory looked like the cells in the photographs in this book. Later I was to go to the National Art School (the old goal across the road) and recall the inside of the station with some fondness. Both the station and Goal buildings particularly are eerie, and supposedly haunted - they did hang people there. Something just leaks out of the stonework & you shiver though I never saw any ghosts while there. The bitter part is later I applied for the job of police photographer at the same station and I was rejected because I was female. Equal rights wasn't in force then - I'd read the Female Eunuch by Greer but I was ahead of my times.. Still I want the book.
October 12, 2010
Incredible 'forgotten' police photos from turn of the century Sydney and the stories of the crims, sly-grog runners and prostitutes not often captured in text book history - the glass plates from decades of early police crime photography were discovered recently after a government warehouse basement flooded - the photos are amazing and very high quality due to the glass plate process - the glimpses of this forgotten Sydney are incredibly rich & detailed.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews