This startling picture belongs to an album of 172 police photographs of Paris crime scenes and criminal mug shots recently acquired by the Museum. Although it was probably assembled by a private investigator or secretary who worked at the Paris prefecture, the album served not as an official record but as a private scrapbook of exceptionally gruesome or notorious crimes.

The photographs were not made with art in mind, yet they possess a mordant power that surpasses their original, utilitarian function as evidence. Shot from above with a wide-angle lens, this vertiginous view of a stout, middle-aged woman lying prone on a polished wood floor radiates a nightmarish intensity. In other pictures, the careful depictions of the deserted streets, bedrooms, and bourgeois parlors where murders were committed are imbued with a poignancy that recalls Eugène Atget's quietly lyrical photographs of Parisian storefronts and empty interiors. Recorded in the deadpan style of the police report, the small, ordinarily overlooked details of turn-of-the-century domestic life take on an ominous import and a strange, unsettling beauty.