Murder in Black and White: Victorian Crime Scenes and the Ripper Photographs

Author(s): Megha Anwer

Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 56, No. 3, Special Issue: Papers and Responses from the
Eleventh Annual Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association (Spring
2014), pp. 433-441
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.56.3.433
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Murder in Black and White:

Victorian Crime Scenes and the Ripper Photographs
Megha Anwer

he paucity of criticism on the photographic evidence of Jack

the Rippers murders is striking and surprising, particularly
given that these images amount to one of the first visual documentations of what are now called sex crimes. Even Robert McLaughlins pioneering study The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs falls
short of adequately decoding whats really going on in the pictures
themselves, in part because he seems less interested in the content of
the photographs than in the biographical details of the photographers
who created them. This essay hopes to address and correct this interpretive gap. Through a close analysis of the few Ripper photographs
that still survive, I seek to recover the representational codes governing
the visual, spatial, and gender politics of these images. In the first
section I examine the postmortem portraits of the victims. In the
second, I explore the continuities I see between the full-body mortuary
photographs of the victims and a broader Victorian art aesthetic. In
the third and final section I study closely the single crime-scene photograph of the body of Mary Kelly (the Rippers fifth victim).1
I.
Suren Lalvani argues that in the nineteenth century, photography was believed to be an apparatus of insight (50) that could
reveal, in the words of Naomi Rosenblum, personality, intellect, and
A bstract: The paucity of criticism on photographic evidence of the Jack the Ripper
murders is surprising, particularly given that these images amount to a first-time visual
documentation of what are now called sex crimes. This essay attempts to correct this
interpretive lag. Through a close analysis of the few Ripper photographs that still
survive, I seek to recover the representational codes governing the buried visual,
spatial, and gender politics implicated in these photographs. In doing so I challenge
the bureaucratic filter of official investigations, police reports, and media reportage
that blinds us to the affective dimension of documenting reality.

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434

Megha Anwer

character...through the depiction of facial configuration and expression (Rosenblum 39). The human face was believed to confess the
corruptions of the soulif not always to the naked human eye, then to
the camera, which was thought to possess a magical power to elicit our
darkest secrets. The conviction that criminality could be detected
from photographed features was central to the assembling of the
rogues galleries of police photographs of criminal suspects in
England, France, and America.
The bulk of the Ripper photographs resemble criminal mug
shots in that the camera seems to gaze steadfastly at the victims faces
and focus on little elsewe rarely see a full-body picture, and certainly
none (barring the Mary Kelly photograph) of the body located within
the crime scene itself.2 Disconcertingly, by fixating on the victims facial
physiognomy, the camera transforms these forensic photographs into
pure portraits purged of nearly all crime-scene traces. The effect can
imply that crime is somehow resting immanently within the physiological contours of the victim herself, as if there were something in her
appearance that led to her victimization. The prostitute thus becomes
less the crimes victim and more its provocation.
Read in this light, the ghostly portraits of the Rippers victims
seem to operate more as mug shots for a police lineup than as bodies
photographed for details of the injuries they have suffered. Furthermore, they resemble portraits of sleeping women, photographed clandestinely, voyeuristically, without their knowledge. All that is required
of us, the viewers, is a slight associative legerdemain, and the sleeping
women transform into the women who sleep around. The mortuary
photographs, in that case, function less as objective documents that
supplement textual inventories of violence committed by the Ripper
and more as an archive profiling streetwalkersa female counterpart
to the predominantly male mug-shot compilations of criminal types.
What is being diagnosed through the markers available inside these
photographs is not the Rippers sexual pathology, but rather the
provocative sexual profligacy of his female victims. These portrait
photographs thus offer a moral explanation for why these prostitutes
were killedprecisely because they were prostitutes.
Lalvani points out that Victorian photography was entrenched
in the politics of upward mobility. Lower-class men and women made
their way into studios where they could momentarily conceal their
working-class backgrounds and be made visible in the light of their

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Murder in Black and White

435

aspirations (69). This privilege of temporarily inhabiting desired social

identities is typically not extended to sex workers, however. In fact, the
Ripper victim portraits do just the reverse: they everlastingly freeze these
women, who from all accounts were part- rather than full-time prostitutes, into a singular identity. Jennifer Green-Lewis suggests that every
instance of photography has a potential to be used against its subject
(180); the photographs of the Rippers victims are, indeed, used against
them as a means to typecast them, to pin them down as prostitutesas
criminalized and illegal citizens.
II.
Images of the faces of dead women were, of course, far from
unusual in Victorian England. In Idols of Perversity, Bram Dijkstra lays
bare the nineteenth centurys cult of feminine invalidism (28), in
which physical vigor in women was associated with dangerous, masculinising attitudes (26) and women were encouraged to appear starving
and consumptive as proof of their superior breeding, feminine refinement, and spiritual purity. The sheer number of paintings that depict
women in various stages of abject physical degeneration (28) offers a
parallel and complementary narrative through which to read and
understand the Ripper photographs. Paintings that mysticized and
eroticized dying women may appear sedate, exalting, and even alluring
in comparison to the unbridled maniacal violence suggested by the
Ripper photographs. Still, a certain affinity between them should not
pass unnoticed. Nineteenth-century art had consolidated and celebrated a sadistic culture that pushed women into self-sacrifice to the
point of deatha process that transferred responsibility for the womans
wellbeing to her husband. Womens self-chosen degeneration in
marriage thus was the key to their husbands spiritual and physical
success and long life (Dijkstra 30): behind every successful man is a
decaying woman. And painters and poets relentlessly recorded and
disseminated images commemorating and in effect validating the
slow, sacrificial decay by which women of virtue waste away.
This kind of artistic violence that aestheticizes dying women, I
would argue, resembles the necrophiliac, murderous outpourings of
the Ripper photographs. The full-body postmortem photograph of
Catherine Eddowes could easily be replaced by Albert Von Kellers
1885 painting Study of a Dead Woman, and we would barely notice

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436

Megha Anwer

the difference. Their gaping mouths, sagging breasts, and sunken abdomens allow these visual documents to function as paired mirror images
of one another. What is remarkable about this surgical iconography is
that it cuts across distinct modes and genres of visual documentation.
Both nineteenth-century medical portmortem photographs and
painted portraits intended for galleries and drawing rooms share
many of the same characteristics. These shared codes of representation produce a hybrid form characterized at once by a pseudoscientific
exactitude in painting and by a morbid aestheticization in medical and
mortuary photography.
In the case of the Ripper mortuary photographs, the images
attest to the obliterative artistic might and agency of the Ripper,
while also acknowledging the technical prowess of medical personnel,
the doctors and coroners engaged, with just as much skill as the Ripper,
in reassembling these dismembered and mutilated female bodies. As
Judith Walkowitz notes in City of Dreadful Delight, the Ripper murders
exacerbated popular suspicion of anatomists. Given this atmosphere
of hostility toward medical men, the surgeons involved in conducting
postmortems on the Ripper victims were eager to differentiate their
profession and medical knowledge from the Rippers handiwork. They
humbly asserted that they themselves could not perform such injuries
as efficiently and quickly as the Ripper had (Walkowitz 211). The postmortem photographs may thus be understood as participating in and
contributing to the medical communitys attempts at moral self-
rehabilitation. The victim photographs are evidence of the salutary
functions of medicine, its ability to piece and suture back beleaguered
body parts and recover a semblance of the human contours of a woman
disfigured and mutilated beyond recognition. The doctors may not
have had the knowledge to inflict injuries as masterfully as the Ripper,
yet they had the expertise and know-how to reverse the damage, to
repair the bodies left in his wake. The photographs therefore transform these women into canvases upon which menwith competing
motivationsprove their aesthetic and scientific mastery.
III.
Photography in the Victorian period participated vigorously in
consolidating the post-Enlightenment perception of a coherent autonomous subject (Pultz 716). Photographs championed the idea of a freely

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Murder in Black and White

437

observing individual who also had infinite access to the signs and means
of self-representationa right that had until recently been the exclusive
preserve of the aristocracy. The photograph of Mary Kelly at the crime
scene in Millers Court, however, unnervingly disrupts this coherently
self-fashioning function of photography. If, as Peter J. Hutchings reminds
us, a reduction of reality to what can be seen, or measured...involves a
will to mastery (241), then surely the photograph of Mary Kellys
disaggregated body brings to light an inverse phenomenon: the awareness that even if something can be documented, this does not guarantee
that it can be grasped or understood.
In contrast to the mortuary portraits of the Rippers other
victims, Mary Kellys brutalized body and disfigured features signal a
chilling loss of identity or identification. Her hopelessly anonymous,
vanished face becomes infinitely transposable: the defaced prostitute
could be literally anyone. In this case the photograph, like the butchered body, does not in the least facilitate a cohering identification
function. Instead, it sets in motion a reeling sense of instability and
exchangeable selves, what Daniel Novak calls an economy of interchangeable people brought on by the mechanics of effacement (30).
This breakdown of distinction between the self and the sexual
otherthe prostituteelicits our visceral response of incomprehension mingled with terror. To use Julia Kristevas theory of horror,
Kellys mangled corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is
the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life (4).
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggests that photographs
invariably convey the idea of death in the future (101). When we look
at the photograph of a loved one after she has died, temporality blurs
in such a way that we transpose the knowledge of her death into the
past and think: she is going to die. [We] shudder...over a catastrophe
which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead,
every photograph is this catastrophe (96). Mary Kellys photograph
does something even more devastating. Its empty, dismantled orifices
markers of the Rippers violencepredict not death, but the traumas
of the body postmortem: the Rippers ripping prefigures the process of
slicing, opening up, and investigating the body during autopsy procedures. What this photograph reproduces to infinity is not a moment
that could never be repeated existentially (Barthes 4), but one that
will in fact be reenacted the very instant after this photograph has
been takenthe body will be removed from the crime scene, placed

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Megha Anwer

on a surgical table, taken apart, and then repackaged all over again. If
the abject revolts us because it is (as Kristeva suggests) death infecting
life, then this photograph is nauseating twice over.
Ironically, in our attempt to detect and decipher death, we
shift and move about the dead body (and with it, figuratively, the traces
of the crime scene) into multiple, discontinuous spaces: from the
venue of the crime to the postmortem room, and thence to the morgue,
the graveyard, the police station, the courtroom. The crime scene
morphs into something variable, portable, and locationally nonspecific, spilling out in all directions. Confronted with this fluidity and
expansibility of the scene, the crime-scene photograph struggles to
fixate, stabilize, and localize the crime through chemicals on a piece
of paper. Thus to photograph crime is not just to document it, but also
to hope to contain its threatened overflow, to limit its proliferative
potential and neutralize its danger. The forensic photograph is meant
at least in part to disconnect and exclude the contents of the photographic frame from the world that lies beyond its bordersthe very
world that must be protected from being turned into a crime scene.
Kellys crime-scene photograph, however, seems to resist and
sabotage the drive to contain it. If photography often attempts to decontextualize the event, to disjoin it from history, then Kellys photograph
reinstates itself within history. Among other things, this photograph
presents a direct challenge to Victorian journalism and media hype
regarding the missing organ at the time of Kellys murder. In the
aftermath of the murders discovery, rumors about the Ripper having
stolen his fifth victims body parts enveloped the city. The truncated
inquest, which revealed very little information about the body, sent
journalists into a febrile goose chase to find out what parts of the body
were missing (Curtis 19697). In this atmosphere of media mayhem,
the photograph seems to discourage such fetishist preoccupations,
which distracted the populace from confronting the truly horrific
condition of Kellys body as found. To focus on the absent body part
becomes a self-deluding detour that allows us to turn a blind eye to the
remnants of the savaged body left behind by the murderer. The photograph offers a very different visual counternarrative to such journalistic pieces, forcing the viewer to take stock of the sheer evidence of
Kellys misshapen body. In fact, the sight of her organs ranged on the
bedside table undermines any diversionary tactics to fixate on missing
parts. When a human being is reduced to the sum of her hewn and

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Murder in Black and White

439

scattered body parts, it becomes impossible to fetishize any one missing

organ. The question we are forced to tackle when we see the photograph is not what is missing, but rather, what is left?
In this sense the terrible photograph of what remains of Mary
Kellys body visually defies Victorian Londons claims to civilizational
supremacy. The image exposes journalists as inept documenters of a
crisis: they remain preoccupied with reporting irrelevant, sensational
details, missing the forest for the trees. It mocks our belief in humanitys
claimed superiority over the beast, and unravels the distinction
between medical knowledge and the hatchet skills of slaughterers; the
battered body on the bed could just as well be the butchered carcass of
an animal. Walter Benjamin suggested that Eugne Atgets photographs of Paris were reminiscent of the scene of a crimethe morbid
gloom over the night city in his work evoked a deathly, murderous
crime scene (Salzani 169; MacFarlane 23). Kellys photograph is literally an image of a crime scene, but one that questions and undermines
many of its societys premises and presumptions.
Yet even as the photograph does all this, it can also enhance our
emotional sense and experience of the crime scene. For me, the photographs punctumthe preexistent yet unnoticed detail that provokes a
tiny shock (Barthes 49), the incongruous gesture [that]...arrest[s] my
gaze (51)resides in the fact that Mary Kellys face is bizarrely turned
toward the camera. She is looking directly at us through her battered,
swollen eyes. This creates the eerie sensation that she, a dead woman, has
shifted the angle of her head to gaze directly into the cameraas though
to return the photographers gaze. It makes one imagine Kelly turning
her head to watch her murderer walk about the room as he prepared to
mutilate his victim. Somehow, this innocuous minor detail has the
capacity to make us alive to her torment much more than any postmortem
report can. The past tense in which the report catalogues the victims injuriesThe bed clothing...was saturated with blood... the face was
gashed in all directions...both breasts were more or less removed (Dr.
Bonds Post Mortem, emphases added)turns the human being into a
distanced, remote entity, an object of clinical reportage.3 Her face looking
straight at us in the photograph, on the other hand, alerts and returns us
to the real Mary Kelly as a (once) living and intact human being, as a
woman who changes her posture in response to the activities in the room,
who turns her head and rests her hand on her abdomen, and who gazes at
a person, perhaps even at her assailant.

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Megha Anwer

If we read this visual text for its forensic aestheticswhich

emerge when an object of forensic analysis is removed from its legal
and criminalistic connotations and addressed or reframed as a work of
art (Jones 174)it hits us with a power it was never meant to have
(Rugoff 184). In this context, this photograph augments the crime
scene so that we begin to notice things that would have no place in a
juridical context. Even as the crime scene in the photograph is extraneous to the ordered space of the everyday (Wollen 23)the bloody
chaos it records marks it as a calamitous momentit is still ridden by
an overwhelming sense of the banal and vacuous, the hyperreal. If we
look at the image long enough we will begin to notice the wooden slats
of the cot upon which the mattress rests, the design of the bedpost, the
grimy walls of the roomthings that constitute the ordinary, everyday
drabness, the austerity and minimalism, of working-class dwellings.
The usual bureaucratic filter of official investigations, police
reports, and even media reportage blinds us to the affective dimension
of depictions of crime scenes. In this essay, through revisiting the
Ripper photographs, I have tried at once to demonstrate the operations of this blindnessto show why we do not normally see certain
details and qualities in such imagesand to undo those operations, to
allow us to see that which we would have missed.
Purdue University
NOTES
I would like to thank Emily Allen, Dino Felluga, and Lance Duerfahrd for helping me
through different stages of this essay. A special thank you to Daniel Novak, Paul
Deslandes, and Marlene Tromp for suggesting future directions for this project.
1
Mary Kellys crime-scene photograph is reproduced in Begg (14849).
2
Refer, for instance, to the mortuary photographs of Martha Tabram, Mary
Ann Nichols, and Catherine Eddowes. The mortuary photographs of Tabram and
Nichols are reproduced in Eddleston (11, 19). Postmortem photographs of Eddowes
can be found on the Casebook: Jack the Ripper website at <http://www.casebook.org/
victims/eddowes.html>.
3
Dr. Thomas Bond wrote the postmortem report on Mary Kelly after examining her remains. The report was lost until as recently as 1987, when it was returned
anonymously to Scotland Yard. For a longer discussion of the medical and media
reportage of the Rippers victims, see Curtis (21337).

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