Razor gangs: eerie mugshots paint picture of Sydney's criminal past
This article is more than 6 years oldImages enhanced by Matt Loughrey add colour and intrigue to Australian police photographs from the 1920s and 30s
Almost a century since the razor gangs terrorised the streets of Sydney, slashing and disfiguring their victims with razor blades, historic police photographs of the suspected criminals of that era have been transformed by Matt Loughrey.
The colourised photographs showcase the likes of Matilda “Tilly” Devine, the brothel madam and gangland leader known as the Queen of Woolloomooloo, who once used a razor to carve open a man’s face in a barber’s shop. Her rivalry with Kate Leigh, the so-called Queen of Surry Hills, gripped the heart of Sydney in the 1920s and early 30s and led to several deaths.
The photographs held by Sydney Living Museums were black and white but through his laborious work Loughrey has added colours to make them appear disconcertingly modern. He used neural network software to determine the colours, and a stylus and graphics tablet to digitally paint each image by hand.
Each one took about three hours and the former Sydneysider has completed hundreds.
“I began en masse in 2013,” he says. “One of the first I did was of Vera Crichton. She stood out a mile for her glaring face and for the story behind it [she was arrested after being caught conspiring to procure a miscarriage – which is no longer a crime]. I attempted her several times.
“There’s something about getting a grasp on what the reality was back then. Black and white is so dismissive. When you see it in colour you realise it wasn’t so long ago and their problems weren’t so different to yours.
“Looking into the faces of criminals is such a self-reflective thing. You start to ask questions about your own life – are you going to end up like someone in these pictures?”
With competing empires fuelled by illegal booze, cocaine, prostitution, gambling and extortion, the criminal gangs used razors rather than guns to enforce their territory after the Pistol Licensing Act of 1927 meant automatic jail time for anyone caught carrying a gun.
Some of the images come from a series of about 2,500 “special photographs” taken by New South Wales police department photographers between 1910 and 1930, mostly in the cells at Central police station. The subjects were given freedom “to position and compose themselves for the camera as they liked”, according to Peter Doyle, a curator. This, he said, gave them a photographic identity constructed of “inborn disposition, personal history, learned habits and idiosyncrasies, chosen personal style (haircut, clothing, accessories) and physical characteristics”.
Among the subjects colourised by Loughrey is Barbara Taylor Turner, one of NSW’s greatest con artists, who took thousands of pounds from local solicitors using six aliases. She was jailed for a year after the photograph seen here was taken.
Another is Ellen Kreigher, who is pictured grinning for the camera after being arrested and charged over the much-publicised murder of Gertrude Mabel Heaydon. Heaydon had been taken to a Coogee flat in 1922 for an illegal abortion. She died and police later claimed she was murdered at the behest of Heaydon’s husband, Alfred. The putrefying remains were taken away in a horse and cart, and the case became known as the “Coogee trunk mystery”. Kreigher was one of four people committed for trial over the murder but a month later the charges against her were dropped.
Loughrey, formerly a photographer and now living in Ireland, says he fears for the current state of the photographic industry and is pursuing colourisation as an alternative course. He has created about 350 colourised images to date, many of which can be found on his Instagram account: @my_colorful_past.
“I’ve also done dustbowl America and [portraits of veterans from] the Napoleonic wars, but my favourite to work on to date was a Nasa set on the space race,” he says.
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