Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886-1902
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 YorkCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.