A greedy bon vivant, a bumbling police chief, a child abuser, an aging and decrepit prostitute, a self-important criminologist: these are just a few of the motley characters who populate Eugenia Parry’s recent volume of short essays, Crime Album Stories: Paris 1886–1902. Historians of photography no doubt will be already familiar with Parry’s extensive contributions to the scholarship of nineteenth-century photography: as the author and coauthor of several important studies on the use of the calotype in France and on the work of Gustave LeGray and Edgar Degas, among others, Parry has dedicated her professional life to the research and teaching of art and photographic history. Crime Album Stories marks her first book-length attempt at a new genre of photographic writing: creative nonfiction. Written from a range of points of view—including those of a murderer, a witness, and an omniscient narrator—each of Parry’s twenty-five short pieces recounts the unfolding of a murder in late nineteenth-century Paris, sketched in unflinching detail and circled around one photograph from an extraordinary album she found in a Parisian photography dealer’s gallery. This album of crime-scene and postmortem photographs compiled by an unknown collector becomes for Parry an objet trouvé, a found object that not only speaks to her, but which also becomes a space onto which she projects her own psychic fears and desires.

In her introduction, Parry describes her simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion upon first seeing the photographs: “They’re beautiful. They make me sick” (11). During the course of twenty-five years, the author feels compelled to make repeated visits to the album, and from each of its photographs, a gruesome tale is spun. She writes that she attempted to animate the mute, mysterious album with archival research, reading Paris newspapers and police dossiers, but found this kind of research fruitless: “All I get is facts. The pictures in the album say something else, ask me to separate the victims from the blood, to distinguish between the murderers’ wild alibis” (12). Crime Album Stories is thus Parry’s attempt to make the album speak.

The volume is bookended by two stories told from the point of view of Alphonse Bertillon, father of the forensic science of anthropometry and a pioneer in the use of photography for criminal identification and surveillance. Bertillon, who worked in the Department of Justice in late nineteenth-century Paris, based his system on the hypothesis that no two individuals would possess identical body measurements, and that repeat offenders could therefore be positively identified when their bodily statistics were compared against those on file with the police. He organized these statistics, coupled with profile and frontal photographic portraits—the original mugshot—onto file cards housed in a massive archive. In addition to using photography as a form of evidence, Bertillon also introduced the practice of taking photographs of crime scenes both for their ability to provide clues perhaps unnoticed by the detectives on the scene, and for their overwhelming emotional power in courtroom presentations. For Parry, Bertillon symbolizes the apex of the nineteenth-century faith in empirical science, in the power of vision to control, and, above all, in the evidentiary potential and ontological truthfulness of photography.

What Parry’s stories point to, however, is not the photographs’ positivist value as visual documents, but rather their utter inadequacy in that regard: their inability to tell the whole truth. What is most remarkable about these pictures—despite their intended function as evidence—is the amount of freedom they allow the author in creating a story of her own. The all-too-trite saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is here upended; for Parry, the photograph does not eliminate the necessity of verbal description, but rather inspires—even requires—an external narrative. In the story “Fat and Ashes,” Parry’s narrator describes the arrival of a photographer from Bertillon’s department, sent to document the furnace in which a murderer burned the body of his victim, a hapless bill collector. Parry ventriloquizes in the third-person voice: “The photographer also records the brazier. He shows it next to a poker and piece of rope. The grate looks too small to have held a combusting human being. The picture reveals nothing of the ferocity of the crime. Its meaning depends entirely on the story” (145). Parry seeks to provide those stories the photos cannot tell. The photographs in Parry’s narratives thus serve a dual function: they serve as jumping-off points for her fictional meditations on murder, but they also continually anchor these stories to the real, confronting the reader with their status as evidence of a brutal act that did in fact take place. Truth and fiction are held in a precarious tension: the photographs not only provide evidence of the crime committed, but also seem to testify to the “truth” of her fictive narrative.

As a work of fiction, Crime Album Stories is in several ways deeply flawed. Although the conceptual premise is interesting, Parry’s historical fiction sometimes veers dangerously close to pedantry. Her incorporation of “fact” into a quasifictive narrative is frequently ham-handed, as in the first chapter, where she adopts the voice of Bertillon:

Clinging to the instincts of a historian, perhaps, Parry seems reluctant to give herself over entirely to the writing of pure fiction. As a result, the potentially powerful tension between factual aspect and fictional narrative is sometimes less provocative than simply awkward. And while lovers of guts and gore will be richly rewarded by the text, sadly, the photographs are so poorly reproduced that the viewer is denied the pleasure of poring over them for the hidden artifacts they might contain. Instead of clues, the viewer is confronted with the trace of the photograph’s digital transformation into print; the effects of the low-resolution scanning are most irritatingly apparent just where detail is most wanted. Its shortcomings as literature aside, in its liminal status between fiction and fact, Crime Album Stories opens onto a number of pertinent questions for literary scholars and historians alike.

In her study Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), literary scholar Wendy Lesser examines our collective fascination with murder and its frequent appearance in a variety of literary modes. Although writers have been drawn to the subject since antiquity, she notes today an “increasing tendency…to convert real-world murder into made-up stories, or into artworks that offer the same satisfactions as made-up stories” (Lesser 2). From where does this desire to see murder stem? How do we explain our ability to derive aesthetic pleasure from the depiction of this most heinous of acts? Lesser argues that it is the reader’s possibility of identification—not as mere witness, but as actual participant—that gives murder literature its uncanny power, especially when this invitation to identification is underscored by the author’s use of the first person (55). It is this powerful thrill of identification that drives the stories in Parry’s anthologies, a possibility that is radically expanded by the number of voices she adopts. Parry’s stories offer the reader (and herself) the possibility of total immersion into a world both historically and morally distant.

Parry’s investigation into the motives of the murderer—and her desire to identify with the murderer—is not, however, purely the result of a morbid curiosity or fascination with crime. The reader who takes pleasure in the semivoyeuristic experience afforded by the reading of author acknowledgments, in the sifting through of in-jokes and private allusions, will find new insight into Crime Album Stories by reading her dedication at the very end of the volume. This story, much briefer than the other twenty-five, presents a dispassionate description of a Greek immigrant who leads a largely unremarkable life in America, only to murder another immigrant in a fit of revenge at the age of seventy. This story, too, is accompanied by a photograph that shows a young man seated at a table, his chair pushed back slightly, wearing a cap, suspenders, and a sullen expression. Parry writes, “The photograph of him at ten shows the murderer before committing his crime, the village-child-voyager, an important part of whom is dormant, perhaps already dead. He was my father. This book is dedicated to him as he was then” (Parry 314). In a rhetorical move straight out of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), Parry muses on the once-innocent boy, her nostalgia tainted with the knowledge that he will one day become a murderer. Like Barthes’s photograph of his mother as young girl in the Winter Garden, the photograph of Parry’s father allows her to know him “as he was then,” to envision him as an innocent young man, before he committed the crime whose motivation Parry seems to be trying to uncover in her stories. Unlike the other photographs in this book, which show the bloody evidence of crimes already committed, the photograph of Parry’s father shows him permanently suspended in a state of innocence. Nothing in the photograph predicts the violence that will mark his old age. More importantly, however, Parry’s Barthesian response to her father’s image parallels her fictional recreations of crime stories. In Camera Lucida Barthes reads in the essence of the photograph a sense of its immutable pastness; as a result, the photograph’s “truth”—its ability to pierce, or wound, the viewer—is entirely subjective.

Parry’s highly personal motives for writing this book suggest an autobiographical aspect to her work, and although Crime Album Stories is not autobiography in any standard sense of the genre, the comparison is not unproductive. After all, what is autobiography if not creative nonfiction? Like Parry’s stories, autobiography hovers in a space somewhere between fact and fiction, at once attached to a set of facts and yet filtered through the fictive device of narrative. In an essay entitled “Life Writing and Light Writing; Autobiography and Photography” (Modern Fiction Studies 40 (1994): 459–492), Timothy Dow Adams considers recent debates about photography’s referentiality or indexicality and sees these questions as parallel to recent literary debate about the nature of autobiography. He argues that photography and autobiography occupy nearly identical positions in their respective disciplines; both are understood to have a peculiar claim to the status of “real,” although that very connection is itself hotly contested. “In short,” Adams writes, “autobiography and photography are commonly read as though operating in some stronger ontological world than their counterparts, fiction and painting, despite both logic and a history of scholarly attempts that seem to have proven otherwise. Barthes’s description of a photograph could apply as well to autobiography: ‘a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”) a mad image, chafed by reality’” (Adams 467). It is this very madness, this temporal collapse effected by the photograph and the tension between past and present, between truth and fiction, that Parry exploits.

Parry’s book, in its knitting together of document and speculation, of evidence and conjecture, thus mirrors the problematic of writing history itself. Indeed, the divide between history and fiction is not so broad as it might seem. In his study of the use of literary devices in the writing of history, “The Fictions of Factual Representation” (Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978): 121–134), Hayden White points out that the perception of fiction as antithetical to history is a relatively recent historiographical development. Despite attempts on the part of nineteenth-century historians to turn history into an empirical science, any telling of history, White argues, is necessarily a form of narrative, fragments of evidence strung together to create a cohesive and ordered world: “[Nineteenth-century historians] did not realize that the facts do not speak for themselves, but that the historian speaks for them, speaks on their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is—in its representation—a purely discursive one” (White 125). That these narratives are necessarily told from a particular point of view is implicit in White’s model. Parry’s use of multiple voices not only allows the reader to identify with a variety of points of view, but it also makes explicit the impossibility of monolithic authority in the writing of history.

The photographs in Crime Album Stories, once designated as evidence and attached to particular criminal investigations, become, in Parry’s hands, free-floating signifiers, generating an unlimited wealth of potential meaning. Her stories, although set in nineteenth-century Paris, seem to signal the utter impossibility of that century’s empiricist project. More importantly, they point to the status of the photograph in the postmodern condition. Around the anchoring “facts” of the photographs, Parry’s narratives construct stories that are also histories, histories that are themselves metafictions.