Art and Crime: Visual Culture and Forensic Science

What is the relation between art and crime? Criminology has been established as a science through facial compositions, fingerprints, photography, and documentation of crime scenes. Artists worked alongside jurists and police investigators in developing forensic science. In the course we will examine the connection between forms of observation, representation and documentation that have come into police use, and social approaches and scientific approaches to crime - degeneration, moral panic, profiling, incrimination and surveillance. We will focus on how representation of crime has created new categories of deviation and normality and emphasize visual and artistic dimensions of the practice of the study of crimes from the end of the nineteenth century to the present - from unconventional collaborations between criminals and artists as they attempt to recreate or decipher felony.