What Was Criminology? From Photography to Fine Art in Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Anthropology (c.1898-1913)

• In Event: Concerned Criminology: Championing Socially Committed Visual Research and a Positive-Critical Perspective on Deviance and Crime

Abstract

Despite the emergence of visual criminology in recent years and a longer-standing historical criminology, the visual-cultural history of criminology remains neglected. Nowhere is this neglect more profound than with regards to Cesare Lombroso’s (1835-1909) nineteenth-century science of criminal anthropology. Given that Lombroso is regarded as the founding father of criminology, a visual-cultural history of our discipline should begin with him. A cursory glance through “Criminal Man in relation to anthropology, jurisprudence and prison disciplines” (1876) reveals it to be rich in terms of the quality of images therein. Yet, no in-depth study on this subject has been published. In this paper, I present the first study of the subject wherein I recover a distinctive but previously ignored discourse about the visual and especially Fine Arts in Lombroso’s criminal anthropology. This takes us through the long-nineteenth century and from photography to painting, especially as it manifests as academic or Fine Art. I argue that Lombroso’s criminal anthropology was not merely a visual, but creative and specifically artistic enterprise. I revise the origin story of criminology by troubling the relationship between science on the one hand and the arts on the other. What was criminology? Not what we knew it to be...

Author

• Kate West, Oxford Brookes University