In Belle Epoque Paris, a woman half dangles off a polished wooden bed, as an old-fashioned portrait stares sternly from the wall. Yesterday’s clothes lie heaped on a footstool, never meant for the public’s gaze. Are we looking at a Manet painting of a courtesan? No—there has been violence here. Who invited us to see? At the end of the 19th century, Parisian police officer Alphonse Bertillon devised a new system of crime scene photography, inviting detectives, jurors, and newspaper readers into scenes of violence and private interiors never so starkly revealed before. Previously, detective work had relied on first-person testimony over circumstantial evidence. Crime scenes were recorded in sketches and notes, in whatever manner the police could manage with the materials they had, free of any standard or system. The camera, used sporadically since the mid-1800s to take portraits of alleged criminals, was, in Bertillon’s new system, meant to usher in a new era of objectivity in foren...