ABSTRACT This essay explores the challenges encountered in pursuing interdisciplinary research into forensic material culture, in particular the forensic photograph. Scholarly research projects which are also geared towards popular curatorial outcomes (public exhibitions, publications, digital media outputs) are subject to complex ethical and methodological considerations. Drawing on his own curatorial experience the author suggests that a major task in researching forensic material culture involves finding the ‘research question’ itself, or even more fundamentally, defining what precisely is the object of study. Arlette Farge delights in the revelations of everyday life offered by the eighteenth-century judicial archive, but what, the essay asks, of the more recent archival police matters, hovering on the cusp of memory and forgetting? In line with Farge’s idea that research may lead to a ‘remaking’ of the archive, the essay narrates the author’s experience of re-rendering, redescribing selected forensic images via the medium of pencil and charcoal drawing. It is suggested that the ‘research question’ and ‘object of study’ might be revealed, at least in part, via the manual acts and labours of such redescription, and the necessary long-term reflection and consideration such labour necessarily entails.

中文翻译：

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阅读警察档案：内在和法医人工制品

摘要 本文探讨了对法医物质文化，尤其是法医照片进行跨学科研究时遇到的挑战。同样面向流行策展成果（公共展览、出版物、数字媒体输出）的学术研究项目受到复杂的伦理和方法考虑因素的影响。作者根据自己的策展经验建议，研究法医物质文化的一项主要任务是找到“研究问题”本身，或者更根本的是，确定研究对象的确切含义。Arlette Farge 对 18 世纪司法档案所提供的日常生活启示感到高兴，但这篇文章提出的问题是，最近的档案警察问题是什么，徘徊在记忆的尖端而遗忘？与 Farge 的观点一致，即研究可能导致档案的“重建”，这篇文章叙述了作者通过铅笔和木炭绘画的媒介重新渲染、重新描述选定的法医图像的经历。有人认为，“研究问题”和“研究对象”可能至少部分地通过这种重新描述的手工行为和劳动来揭示，并且这种劳动必然需要进行必要的长期反思和考虑。