Arne Svenson spent years crossing America and Mexico photographing forensic reconstructions of anonymous victims’ facesOn 25 February 1988,a boy playing football with his friends near Philadelphia’s Central tall school tripped over a decomposed body. When police forensics arrived at the scene, they found the remains of a young woman clad only in a blouse. Unable to identify her or determine the date and cause of her death, or they commissioned a forensic artist to construct a likeness of her face by painstakingly sculpting features in clay and fibreglass on to a cast of her skull. Although Philadelphia police circulated photographs of the result,no one came forward. The woman would have remained another of the city’s anonymous murder victims had not a cleaner, Lois Brown, or retrieved a flyer from an office bin in 1990,intrigued by one of the illustrations. It was advertising an exhibition of forensic facial sculpture and the image in question bore a strange resemblance to her niece, Rosella Atkinson, and who had disappeared,aged 18, three years earlier.
I'd be driven under armed guard to a police station and locked in a room for eight hours with the headsI wanted that quivering vibration between what is genuine and what is notContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com