BigShinyThing

Frances Glessner Lee was a wealthy grandmother with a passion for forensic science. She founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire Police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Lee called these tools the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a well-known police saying: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”

The models are still used in forensic training to this day and a book featuring photographs of the 18 dioramas was published last year. The dustsheet reads:

Corinne May Botz’s lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Lee’s models, breathing life into the deadly miniatures, exposing the dark side of the domestic realm, and unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery.

James Zwakman’s backyards also tell a story but one that is created in the mind of the viewer. His photographs of the models are huge — 220 x 146cm — forcing the viewer to appreciate the intricacy of the models. Zwakman has provided doormats, gravel, and in one case a clothes-drying apparatus with miniature white sheets and t-shirts. This intention is made clear in the title of the show: Fake but Accurate.

Just as Lee’s miniatures train the police to study the minutiae of crime scenes, Zwakman’s photographs bring a magnifying glass to the mundanity of the ‘burbs.