City of Shadows & Underworld Limited Offer

Buy the bundle for $75 and save $39.95 (combined RRP $114.95).

City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948 

Focusing on the victims, perpetrators and vicinity of crimes, the original City of Shadows introduced the world to the Justice & Police Museum's extraordinary and compelling collection of police forensic photography dating from 1912 to 1948.

Peter Doyle with Caleb Williams
Published 2005 
Hardcover
240 pages
215mm x 310mm
9781876991203

Underworld: Mugshots from the Roaring Twenties

Underworld features intriguing mugshots of police suspects from 1920s Sydney, documenting the denizens of the criminal underworld, from stone-cold gangsters to wayward youths, and providing a remarkable rogues' gallery of thugs and thieves, prostitutes and pickpockets, white-collar opportunists and blue-collar gunmen.

The images are selected from a collection of more than 2500 glass-plate negatives, part of the New South Wales Police Forensic Photography Archive held at the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney. Never intended for public consumption, they are unique among international criminal portraiture. Suspects smile, laugh, snarl, or sneer at the camera and each image is infused with the sitter's personality.

The accompanying essays ponder the remarkable aesthetic of the images and document the rapidly changing postwar world, exploring how new trends in crime played out on the streets of New York, Paris, and Sydney. The stories of the suspects shine a light on the dark side of the Roaring Twenties in Sydney.

Underworld was an exhibition held at Museum of Sydney in 2017, and is now a travelling exhibition. Click here for further details.

Discover more about this fascinating era online by clicking here.

Nerida Campbell with Lucy Sante and Alistair Sooke
Published December 2017
Hardcover
288 pages
235mm x 320mm
ISBN 9781876991456