Joanna Gilmour
Canberra: National Portrait Gallery, 2015.

“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 carte 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.” (publisher’s blurb)