More real than we think

"Every photograph within the Justice and Police Museum archive permits a return to an earlier reality. With this comes the revelation of a bygone vitality – restoring to us the self-absorbed energy, the hungry obsession with the instant and the complacency of the past - that challenges our right to call the contemporary moment, privileged, solid and authentic. In terms of the collection’s mug-shot portraiture in particular, we are forced to apprehend auras that are far from withered, in the Benjaminian sense. Instead we encounter police and prison portraits of forgotten offenders that crackle with electricity, uncannily alive with a passion, insolence and melancholy that stares back defiantly at us, from a frozen moment deep inside the past. "
- Caleb Williams, Haunted by Vitality that is No More