Customer Reviews

Crime Album Stories

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Eugenia Parry opens Crime Album Stories with an anecdote of chance discovery. Approaching a man selling fossils in the Paris flea market, she asks him if he has any daguerreotypes. This question leads her to find an album of the most gruesome photographs you can imagine, culled from the Parisian police and tucked away in the back room of an oriental antiquities gallery. The photos are of bodies, body bits, and interiors bearing the telltale signs of violence and its untimely discovery.

Parry returns to Paris many times for the next twenty-five years, and each time returns to that barren back room to scrutinize the photos. "They're beautiful. They make me sick." Crime Album Stories spins this collection into an extraordinary series of poetic prose narratives which detail the "facts" behind each grisly scene. The stories are written from a number of points of view: bystander, acquaintance, intimate, criminal, investigator: the chance discovery of murder. Framing this structure is an autobiographical fiction purportedly by Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of le bertillonage, or anthropometry, a system of statistical measurement that was designed to ensure the reliable identification of criminals and criminal behavior. Bertillon's perspective reminds us of the role of photography as documentary, and evidentiary, at the same time as it remains, throughout the book, hauntingly evocative of the transitoriness of what it seeks to document and evidence.

I was given this book by someone who claimed that they had seen it and knew it was for me. It's a disquieting thought, but quite correct. The pictures are like Atget seen by David Lynch (Walter Benjamin noted of Atget that his pictures were as if of crime scenes); the narratives are really pretty disconcerting: it's beautiful and it does make you sick. The book's stories capture the essential elements of crime: randomness and inevitability. Some deaths are terrifyingly happenstance, others dreadfully predictable. The death of the "Child Martyr," Pierre-Albert Gregoire (two years old), comes as the inevitable finale to his life of torture at the hands of his father and step-mother; the death of the "Ground Bird," Caroline-Celeste Fourmentin (seventy-nine years old), a vagrant eviscerated in the tool shed where she lived, is a random event with unknown actors. The murder of "La Petite Gourmet," Angele Cheze, falls somewhere between these two, as the seven-year old is lured off the streets by a familiar stranger, one of the anonymous denizens of the streets of fin-de-siecle Paris.

These crimes remind us that categories such as serial killers may merely be a contemporary way to classify the essentially unclassifiable phenomenon of random acts of violence, an urge not so unlike the bertillonage which frames the book. In a similar way, Parry's dedication, which comes rather unusually at the end of the book, reminds us that even in the story of the album's discovery, one which sets the scene for these tales of stray violence and what may be scattered yet informative, there's also a logic of inevitability - familial, historical, circumstantial, and appalling - which may render such shocking material poetic, and beautiful. Parry's stories are almost as haunting as the images: an elaboration of the past, in a different medium, that reminds us that we are always *after* the event, both historically, and intellectually. She captures this questing for more by offering the equivocal consolation of fiction, which supplies details at the expense of that very exactitude which makes these pictures so ghastly.

what a wwonderful book on a such a gruesome subject. examining "crime" photos of fin de siecle france, the author blends myth, history, science, beauty, horror to provide a blow-by-blow account of some of the most sensational crimes to hit france in the late 1800s. this book is lavishly printed and designed, and the photo reproductions are marvelous if a bit horrifying to scrutinize. what the author does so skillfuly is how she evokes the spirit or sense of the crime--crimes of passion, rage, botched robberies, abuse--with a mastery of wit, art, awe, and elegance. the backdrop of the book is the birth of forensic science and the belief that looking at photos of crimes and criminal scenes would provide a taxonomic or scientific basis and model of the beast that lurks within. this is a book with many quiet surprises as well as bold, graphic images designed to shock.

One doen't see or hear about this book anywhere which is a shame as it is so hugely original and compelling. Parry gives life in 19th Century Paris an incredible immediacy in this selection of stories. I found the photographs almost superfluous except that they do remind you that these imagined tales are actually real. Parry dignifies the dead in a way that is a genuine tribute to our humanity (or at least hers) at a time when I'm not convinced we're feeling all that good about ourselves. If you are hesitating, don't! A truly inspiring work.

This is a very disturbing book, with some extremely gruesome photographs of real-life violent crime scenes and murder victims from Paris around a hundred years ago. The author gives us the fascinatingly tragic and horrible stories behind the photographs, showing us that fact is sometimes stranger and more disturbing than fiction. From the murder of a courtesan to a limbless torso found in a suitcase floating in the river, to an infant neglected to death by his own parents, to an old bag lady found strangled in the bed of her run-down shack, to a waiter who killed a fellow waiter, to a dead body incinerated to hide its existence,--these were all well-publicized sensationalistic crimes which filled the public with titillation, fear and dread. This unique book is simply a must-read for anyone interested in criminology and the "true crime" genre.

David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"

I truly agree with some of the previous reviews,but let me give you an opinion on someone who knows crime photography well.this book is so well organized as far as text, bescause of the fact that it gives you complete stories behind the photos,plus early crime photos that are magnificent as well as tastefull,(believe me,I've seen some that are much worse,but still very intense photos),makes this book one of the best and most tastefully done works on crime photography I have ever owned!It's not a gore book relying primarily on shock value for it's saleability.Although the only thing it does'nt include is photo type reference,although they are all dated.Take it from a collector of early crime photography,this book is truly a gem!

If you're not interested in crime, homocide, early criminological studies, or Paris or have a delicate constitution, don't read this book. However, if these things fascinate you, pay as much as the seller asks because this is a good one. The photos were discovered in Paris by Eugenia Parry, a photography scholar. The photos she found were old Bertillon photos of crime scenes in Paris. Ms Parry then matched the photos to newspaper reports. Some are grotesque, all make you catch your breath: this is what we do to oneanother. Twelve years later came WWI, the trenches, artillery, machine guns and gas. The acts described in this book were not so efficiently conducted. This is a book you won't easily forget.

Raw real life photography, if you have a weak stomache then this

book is not for you. If you think crime is bad today this book will shock you, black and white images of death from the late 1800's to the very early 1900's. This book, though, is a must-have for the true crime buff. Whether it be for the photos, or the stories of how the people were found and how they passed. I can usually look at shocking photos, but this book made me feel like the other photos were nothing, compared to these. If you want a real conversation piece AND a piece of history buy this book. The positions of some of the people are disturbing.