07.02 - 17.05
dans la salle
Vernissage : 07 février à 18h30
Archives de la Police Judiciaire. De beaux assassinats
The exhibition ‘De beaux assassinats’ (Beautiful Murders) delves into the enigmatic world of crime scene reconstructions through photographs from the Archives of the Liège Judicial Police, deposited in the State Archives. These photographs, initially reserved for investigative purposes, capture frozen moments in time where suspects, witnesses and investigators re-enact the events of the crime in unchanged settings, ranging from modest interiors to everyday landscapes turned upside down.
Being a crucial stage in the investigation, the reconstruction brings together suspects, witnesses and investigators in order to compare statements or clarify any unclear points in the facts. Photography plays a central role here: it captures what memory distorts or forgets, transforming violence into a strange theatricality, somewhere between a photo novel and tragic fiction. The exhibition deliberately avoids showing raw horror — violated bodies, lives taken — to focus on the absurdity and cold realism of these staged scenes.
These images, at times chilling, at times incongruous, invite the viewer to question the boundary between reality and representation, and the way in which photography recomposes and assesses the reality of crime. This is certainly not the least paradoxical aspect of these images, which come afterwards to talk about what came before; these photographs mimic the truth in an attempt to reach it.
‘De beaux assassinats’... Diving into the shadow of drama, where tragedy vies with aesthetics.
The Photographic Collection of the Liège Technical and Scientific Police
From the second half of the 19th century, photography became a police tool for identifying suspects. In Belgium, the establishment of the judicial police within the public prosecutor’s offices in 1919 provided a systematic framework for forensic photographers. In Liège, a photographic service existed as early as 1895, but the first known images, produced by the “Technical and Scientific Police” laboratory during field interventions, date from May 1923. A continuous and fully catalogued collection was gradually built up, and its negatives—over 30 years’ worth, numbering more than 100,000—were transferred to the State Archives in Liège in 2019.
By offering a comprehensive overview of criminal, delinquent and accidental events throughout the 20th cen- tury across the provinces of Liège, Namur, Luxembourg, and, until 1972, Limburg, this collection constitutes a new corpus of sources for the study of judicial history, forensic science, evolution of crime, police work, and investigative methods. With their great thematic diversity—suspects, victims, homicide scenes, accidents, reconstructions, autopsies, weapons, stolen or illicitly used objects, and written documents—these photographs enrich knowledge in many other fields of research, such as social history, urban planning, environment, transport and technical, especially photographic, methods. They thus help reveal what justice says about society.
Dr. Laurence Druez
Head of Research, State Archives in Liège
Exhibition produced in collaboration with the State Archives in Liège
Curatorship
Laurence Druez, PhD in History from the University of Liège, Senior Assistant at the State Archives in Liège
Xavier Rousseaux, PhD in History from UCLouvain, Honorary Research Director at FNRS and Visiting Professor at UCLouvain
Xavier Canonne
