Peter Doyle

City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs

In the late 1980s, a vast collection of forensic crime photography, created by the New South Wales Police between 1912 and 1960, was rescued by the Historic Houses Trust from a flooded warehouse. This book draws on Peter Doyle's extensive research into these fascinating and often eerily beautiful images of everyday misadventure in Sydney between 1912 and 1948. Reproduced here to stunning effect, the reader is struck by the power of the photographs to transcend their provenance in police investigation and crime scene recording, to offer breathtaking historical revelation, and to come alive in their own right.