The Perfect Crime by Jan Staiger and Malte Uchtmann

Germany is renowned for its prolific production of crime fiction, a genre that saturates the nation's main television networks daily. Over 238 crime series are broadcast across Germany’s six largest channels, highlighting a significant overrepresentation of fictional murder and manslaughter. "The Perfect Crime" delves into the potential impacts of this media saturation on public perceptions and behaviors. The book explores the integration of imaging techniques in police procedures, their epistemic outcomes, and how fictional crime narratives might warp our reality.

The investigative approach of "The Perfect Crime" is multifaceted, utilizing a range of photographic methods. Photographers Staiger and Uchtmann have captured scenes on the sets of German crime series, employing techniques that exaggerate and abstract the depicted scenarios, juxtaposed with images that purport to show authentic crime scenes and corpses. Additionally, this work features portraits of actors from these series, digitally altered by artificial intelligence to generate new, hypothetical identities, echoing the creation of composite sketches in actual criminal investigations. The book also includes documentation of real-world locations used as sets for these fictional crimes, presented as 3D reconstructions through photogrammetric methods.

Supporting the visual narrative, the book features scholarly contributions. Karen Fromm discusses the implications of forensic media in her essay "Image Traces: Forensic Media and the Documentary Gaze," while sociologists Aldo Legnaro and Andrea Kretschmann analyze the function of crime narratives as frameworks that establish social order. Together, these elements combine to offer a comprehensive examination of the intersection between media representation and societal perception of crime.