Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886-1902 - Hardcover

Eugenia Parry is a widely respected scholar on the history of photography and art. She has been a Professor of Art at both Wellesley College and at the University of New Mexico and has lectured extensively, including at Harvard, Brandeis, Boston University, University of Texas at Austin, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has published extensively on the history of photography. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Art historian and critic Parry (The Short Story and Photography 1880s-1980s: A Critical Anthology, Univ. of New Mexico, 1998) became obsessed with an album of graphic photographs depicting actual crimes scenes and victims in Paris at the turn of the last century. Taken mostly by Alphonse Bertillon, who largely created the modern practice of crime documentation and suspect identification, the photos are of historical importance. But Parry rejected a straightforward presentation of the material, writing several stories based on groupings of crime photos. Her style blends enough of the objective documentarian and the horrified observer to work perfectly. Her fictions elucidate the crucial moments in the lives of the victims and murderers, like the photos themselves, in gruesome detail, raising questions about the ability of photos to capture truth and our own capacity to understand a crime fully. The photographs themselves are so compelling and disturbing that it would be difficult to imagine a prose that could complement them, but here word and image serve each other well. An unusual addition for academic and large public crime and photography collections.
-Douglas McClemont, New York
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