An interview with Jakob Ulens

This week I sat down with Jakob Ulens, a freelance historian and photographer living and working in Antwerp, Belgium. We discussed his long term project curating crime scene photos from the 1920s and 1930s in this same city. Read our full interview below.

Gabe: So do you want to just tell me a little bit about yourself and about the project came to be?

Jakob: I work as a historian and a photographer, but mainly historian, so I help museums and cities to develop exhibitions. A few years ago I was in the city of Ghent and the local museum there had a chance to do an exhibition about the local police of Ghent. The criminal department had a little museum of their own. It was not accessible for the public, only for cops who were getting their training. And that's where I saw for the first time a large collection of those crime scene photos from the 1920s and 30s. There were all kinds of murders and drug deals. And then, well, I got really emotional like “wow this is a truly honest view into that era that we don't have in another way.” The Antwerp criminal police had a huge collection of the glass negatives still there somewhere in the basement. So, like two years ago they said, well it's time to give it to the state archives so it will be preserved well. And then I just went to the state archive and I said that I would love to do something with the collection. And they said, “sure but we don't have that much money to digitize them.” I said, well, I'll do it in my free time. So I spent many, many hours and days doing that for free. Once I turned all the negatives into digital positives, I could do my thing with them.

Gabe: A couple of things kind of stuck out to me. One, you talked about having an honest look into this time and these crimes. I’m super interested in the conversation of objectivity versus subjectivity in this kind of documentary work. Do you see these photos as an objective look into something, or is everything kind of inherently subjective? You know, the idea that there's always someone behind the lens. I'm just interested your thoughts on ideas surrounding those concepts.

Jakob: Well, that's interesting. That's an interesting question. I think the photographer in the 20s, he tried to give something really objective. He was kind of a good photographer. He had a good eye for composition. You can see he often chooses an angle. He steps a few steps to the left or back to make a pretty image. But besides that, it's a truly objective photo because he had no intention of portraying anything but a random scene. And I think the subjective, all the extra meaning and all the extra layers that then come up, they start to exist the moment that the photo lost its use as an objective source in a trial. From that moment on it loses its original connotation and its original meaning. And through time time it gains new layers of the subjective.

Gabe: So you're saying the combination of time and repurposing takes this once objective thing and turns it into the subjective?

Jakob: Yeah, yeah. Many of those photos look like film stills, like old micro pictures from the era. That's quite interesting. And they invite us to to make our own story. To fill in the story. So there is a lot of room for interpretation and subjectiveness.

Gabe: I'm always interested in authorship and these kind of archive projects because essentially you're working with an amalgamation of other people's photos. So where when you place yourself within that, do you consider this your project? Do you consider this collaborative? Where is ownership in something like this?

Jakob: Oh, that's an interesting question because I did a small exhibition and the guy from the cultural center always talked about me being the artist. And I said, “No, in this case, I am not an artist.” The only thing I want to do is show the photos to everyone, and everyone can choose what to see in them and give their own own meaning to them. So I don't consider myself as any kind of author. Even if you do the selection of the pictures. In my opinion I don’t think I am, I’m just making it accessible.

Gabe: I mean, do you think there's authorship in choice? What you leave in, what you leave out, and going along with this question of subjectivity, there is agency there right? So what role do you see that choice playing if it's not authorship.

Jakob: That's such a difficult question and it's really on a philosophical level.

Gabe: Yeah definitely. There’s no right answer. I'm just curious.

Jakob: Okay. Can you ask the question once more?

Gabe: Yes. So I mean, essentially as a documentarian or an archivist, if you're putting this together, you're the one choosing what is left in and what is left out. So there is a method of choice and curation there. And to me, that represents some sort of authorship because you're the one choosing what to put in front of the public eye and what will be interpreted and what won't. You seem to have more of a, “it’s really for the people and I have a small role in it” attitude. I am just was curious about how you view your own selection and and if that process is authorship to you or if it exists as something different.

Jakob: I don't know if I would consider it authorship but now that you talk about it maybe the role I'm playing is bigger than I than I thought about it for myself. Because course I do do a selection. The selection is first about trying to be very careful with the material because the pictures are almost a century old. You’re stepping into people's private private lives and they cannot give permission because they've been dead for a long time. So one thing I want to do is try to be careful. I make choices about how photos can be interesting in different ways. That's maybe my my role. I select photos that look like perfect postcard photos, but also some of them that are more abstract. Some photos reflect different styles. Like neutral graphics or the “Düsseldorf Schüler” with all those industrial buildings. It is not about educating people on what they need to see that but I'm trying get the public to interpret the pictures in different ways.

Gabe: Can you speak to the physicality of the photos that you're talking about? The physical negatives and the tactility of these preserved photos. How does that inform the project and what do those things do for you?

Jakob: Well the interesting thing is before this photographer there were already criminal police but only in the big cities. There’s an already established system of how this works. So the guy takes these photos, he develops them, he makes a print, the print goes into the research files of the criminal police. And maybe if there is a trial, it would be used as evidence at the trial. So the glass negative, which remains, it's kind of an unnecessary object because once the photo has been printed and is in the file it has served it’s judicial purpose. When I made the negatives a positive, I was probably the first person to see it again in 100 years. And that is an amazing feeling. It's very amazing. If you're the first person in the world who has access to this forbidden collection, that makes it very special. Another thing about the tactility is in a lot of the photos, there has been all kinds of degradation processes. Photographers these days are trying to to bring something to their work by playing with texture, chemicals, and layers. Finding out how it can be interesting when they mess it up. In this collection, you get it for free. There is a lot of beauty in it without it meaning to be beautiful.

Gabe: Can you talk a little bit about the subject matter itself, these crime scene photos? Have you learned anything about crime? Do you think these things change over time maybe in the way we view crime or just how the human eye is towards a crime scene?

Jakob: Well today a crime scene photographer would probably take lots of pictures very close up. This guy in the 1920s often came a few hours or even days after and he took only like maybe four or five pictures. If there was somebody wounded or dead the corpse would have been gone for a long time. So most of the time you have a very clean scene. There is no no actual signs of any crime. That makes it interesting. So how do we look at crime? In a lot of the pictures you can see people standing around and they are often really close and they are quite often they are the part of the scene which for us might read like they’re being apathetic. Like they’re just standing there and with their hands in their pants seeming unaffected. Nowadays, if you would do that, you would you would be considered a dark tourist. Now we know we have the urge to see what is happening and can rise above that impulse. In those days watching the scene of an accident wasn’t considered unethical.

Gabe: Well, it's actually super interesting because I think we're having this huge resurgence of of true crime and people always ask, like, why is this so big now? Why is this something that's just cropping up? But it's like this urge has kind of always been there, right? There’s been these things like public hangings and this kind of voyeurism. People always want to see these things happen.

Jakob: Well, I think it also has to do something with our relation to death. So we we've put death into nursery houses and intensive care hospitals so that most of the time it's far away. All of us hope that people around us will die when they are 95. But, you know, in those days, most people died at home and the body stayed in the house for a few days and people would gather around. So people were much more connected to death. We have to be empathic to that.

Gabe: Right. It was less taboo. You're saying culturally, it was more integrated into their daily lives?

Jakob: Yeah. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. True crime is… it’s so difficult because I feel like I'm interested in crime but there’s a lot of true crime that wants to bring gore and that’s it, without giving attention to the people. I’ve been thinking. I've been questioning myself a lot saying can I do this project? Should I stop it? Am I allowed to show it? And I think you have to ask these questions of yourself. But everybody was interested in the project. How do they want to look at the pictures? Are you are you searching for the gore and are you disappointed that there is no body in it or do you see the pictures as a kind of portal to relate to people?

Gabe: Right. There would be a way for this project to be exploited right, You're the one picking and choosing the photos. If you wanted to give in to that kind of dark fascination that you're saying some people have, it would be a much different project. There would be a very different selection of photos.

Jakob: Yeah true

Gabe: I think in in your selection and your choices, you've made it clear statement, right, that it's not about disrespect.

Jakob: Yeah. Well that's well said. Thank you for that.

Want to learn more? Feel free to reach out to me at gabe@nicefilmclub.com and make sure to visit the website and the Instagram here.

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