The journal also described an incident in which the victim's lawyer had used pictures taken on the scene of an accident, which from their seeming realism “explained the whole affair more lucidly than all the oratory of a Cicero or a Demosthenes." In 1853, an American photographic journal reported that in France, lawyers were using daguerreotypes as a more eloquent means of convincing the juries and judges of the situation at hand. By 1848, police in Liverpool and Birmingham, UK, were photographing criminals, and by the mid–1850s, English and French authorities had begun encouraging their law enforcement agencies to photograph prisoners, mostly to prevent escapes and document recidivism. The earliest evidence of photographic documentation of prisoners dates back to 1843 in Belgium. When these cameras became available to the general public in 1839, photography’s potential for identification and documentation of the criminal classes was recognized, making photographs a widely acceptable forensic means of identification. In fact, the forensic applications of photographs were recognized almost as soon as photography itself was invented.įorensic Applications of Photographs: Origin and HistoryĪfter the invention of heliography and the creation of the world’s first permanent photographic image or, more specifically, the earliest known surviving photograph in 1826-1827 by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, several attempts were made to commercialize photography, but it wasn’t until the invention of daguerreotype cameras by French artist and photographer Louis–Jaques–Mandé Daguerre, that camera manufacturing became an industrial procedure. Given its truth–bearing capacity, this information is often used as evidence for making extremely consequential decisions and judgments in several highly sensitive areas such as journalism, politics, civil litigations, criminal trials, defense planning, and surveillance and intelligence operations. Photographs are amongst the most accurate methods of documenting people and objects, and the visual information they provide acts as a permanent, unbiased, and universal record of occurrence of events. And amongst the various kinds of pictorial representations we have devised over the years, photographs are undeniably the most influential. Roman playwright Plautus once wrote, “One eyewitness weighs more than ten hearsays – seeing is believing, all the world over.” Seeing is indeed believing, and this applies not only to the first–hand assimilation of real–world events but to the second–hand ingestion of these events through their pictorial representations as well. That which we drink in at our ears, doth not so piercingly enter,Īs that which the mind doth conceive by sight. On the Origin and History of Photographic Evidence If you want to learn more and get practical, useful skills in photographic evidence analysis, check it out here > The following is just an introduction to an advanced forensics course focusing on photographic evidence.
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