The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Published by Phaidon Books/The Monacelli Press (2004)
Hardcover: 225 pages, 8.5 x 1 x 10.8 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1580931458
Available for order at Phaidon and Amazon
Frances Glessner Lee 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. Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen Nutshell dioramas, on a scale of 1:12, display an astounding level of detail: pencils write, window shades move, whistles blow, and clues to the crimes are revealed to those who study the scenes carefully.
Corinne May Botz's lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Frances Lee's models, breathing life into these deadly miniatures. The accompanying line drawings, specially prepared for this volume, highlight the noteworthy forensic evidence in each case. Botz's introductory essay, which draws on archival research and interviews with Lee's family and police colleagues, presents a captivating portrait of Lee.
Selected Press:
The Nutshell dioramas are compelling, a bit disturbing, and engagingly weird—it never previously seemed possible to use the words 'forensic' and 'cute' in the same sentence. Corinne May Botz has done a grand job both in exposing them to a nonspecialist public and in photographing them with such fanatical verisimilitude.
- Lucy Sante
You can approach The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.
- Robert Gottlieb, The New York Observer
Botz makes the most of her material's tendency to see-saw between fact and fiction, believability and sham…Botz became so familiar with these tiny spaces that her pictures exude a homeyness all the more disconcerting when you notice the bloodstains on the rug and the body under the bedcovers. She hasn't just preserved Lee's meticulous mix of primness and voyeurism, she's given it a whole new life after death.
- Vince Aletti, The Village Voice
Their contemporary revival can largely be attributed to the artist Corinne May Botz…By magnifying the Nutshells, she has somehow rendered them more terrifying and suspenseful, creating an atmosphere of danger that invites our careful attention.
- Katherine Biber
“Corinne May Botz is the David Fincher of the Lee oeuvre. Her camera in The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death gets deep into the scene and renders the most upsetting images with a cold precision that matches the staging. These bits of cloth and plastic, sculpted and arranged with maniacal precision, make death at once childish and bleak. Blown up in Botz’s photos, the scenes radiate anxiety and menace. Dollhouse noir?”
- David Bordwell
“As a writer and a teacher of writing, I’m always on the lookout for writing prompts, which is how I came to own this gorgeous photography book of the Nutshell Studies: eighteen dollhouse dioramas produced by Frances Glessner Lee, a master criminal investigator in the 1940s, for the purpose of training in forensics. The images are as captivating much as they are disturbing, and represent a rare but perfect marriage of the realms of the miniature and criminal deduction. In his essay on the subject, Stephen Millhauser writes that ‘the miniature holds out the promise of total revelation.’ In Glessner Lee’s dioramas of tawdry and violent death, we feel the accompanying prospect of a solution to these crimes, tantalisingly hidden in the smallest of details. All we have to do to perceive it, is look closer; and closer; and more closer still.”
- Sam Gayton
