Collision: misadventure by motor car

The motor car emerged as an essential form of personal transport in the 1920s and increasingly police were called to investigate traffic-related offences.

A selection of images taken by police photographers in the aftermath of incidents that occurred between the early 1920s and 1964 is on display in the Archive Gallery.

The Justice & Police Museum's photography space, The Archive Gallery, presents a display of selected images from the Museum’s archive of forensic negatives.

The archive was originally created by the New South Wales Police between 1912 and 1964 and contains an estimated 130,000 negatives. It may be the biggest police photography archive of its type in the southern hemisphere, and offers the standard fare of police investigation: mug shots, accident scenes, crashes, murders, fires, forgeries, fingerprints – images stemming from every imaginable variety of law breaking, and spanning six decades of the 20th century.

More examples of photographs from the archives can be accessed via our Pictures Collection.

Past exhibition

  • 19 March 2011 - 13 December 2015