Featuring a sometimes disquieting selection of portraits, Sideshow Alley combines history, biography and the art of portraiture with true crime, scandal and sensation. National Portrait Gallery Curator Joanna Gilmour introduces the relationship between death and portraiture via a focus on the various ways in which artists, photographers and entrepreneurs made use of portraits of Australian convicts and criminals: the canny or unscrupulous publishers trading in salacious prints and penny dreadfuls; the otherwise respectable people who put cartes de visite of serial killers into their family albums; the photographic studios doing a brisk trade in portraits of heroes and villains; and the waxworks proprietors who, with their ‘Chambers of Horrors’, turned violence, misfortune and the macabre into a lucrative art form.
Combined with beautifully illustrated prints, drawings and photographs from the collections of major Australian public libraries, archives and galleries as well as from those of the Old Melbourne Gaol, the Victoria Police Museum, and the Justice & Police Museum, Sydney, Sideshow Alley discusses death masks and wax anatomical models amidst a surprising variety of objects, and draws an intriguing portrait of Australian society and culture during the nineteenth century.
