TOOLS OF CRIME

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The series Tools of Crime emerged from research conducted at the Department of Forensic Medicine in Kraków. Every object photographed in the series was used to cause a person’s death—a skipping rope, a kitchen knife, a wooden stake. By withholding the narratives of the crimes themselves, Mirczak removes the objects from any sensational frame. Photographed frontally against a neutral white background and with near-clinical precision, they form an austere photographic typology.

Mirczak places the conventions of documentary and forensic photography in dialogue with the tradition of still life. Detached from their ordinary context and subjected to sustained visual scrutiny, these familiar objects register an irreversible transformation: their everyday functions have been irrevocably altered by the acts in which they were used. Rather than reconstructing individual crimes, the series examines the point at which an object becomes evidence, and the extent to which material things can bear the consequences of human action.

Tools of Crime, 2012
photograph, edition of 10 + 2 AP, 30 × 30 cm