someone sent me a link to this, i think these photographs are stunning:
[link] - some polish text and wider choice of pictures
[link] - a link to a page of the gallery, in english.
see it you won't regret it.
City Of Shadows – Early 20th Century Police Photography, Sydney, Australia
In late 1970s, several tons of negatives were saved from a flooded police warehouse in Lidcombe, a suburb of Western Sydney by Peter Doyle, a curator at the Justice & Police Museum, author of crime stories. For three years Doyle studied hundreds of thousands of prints and arranged them in chronological order, reconstructed the stories of the people shown in them and searched for the names of the photographers.
The mug shots of Sydney’s thieves, frauds, prostitutes, murderers, drug traffickers, procurers, fences or gamblers were taken in the years 1912 to 1948. The mystery around the mug shots that will never be solved is the photographers’ identity. No one knows who the police photographs of 1912-1930 were taken by. Perhaps there was only one photographer, or maybe more.