Jan A. Staiger examines the connection between aesthetics and power, especially with regard to the question of how visual representations generate and reflect social and medial interpretive sovereignty, and thus become an important medium in the manifestation of power structures.

Malte Uchtmann is interested in the construction of reality through documentary image strategies and examines how systems of knowledge, order and representation shape our perception and behavior.

"The Perfect Crime: On the Murder of Reality" is their joint final thesis, as 2022 graduates of the photojournalism and documentary photography program at the Hochschule Hannover, University of applied sciences and arts.

Germany is a crime fiction country. If wanted, fictional murder and manslaughter can be witnessed many times a day throughout the main television networks. There are more than 238 crime series available on Germany’s six largest broadcasting channels.
Based on the overrepresentation of fictional murder on German television, The Perfect Crime investigates the effect of crime series on our perception and behaviour. The work examines the use of imaging techniques within police work and its epistemic implications, as well as the question of how fictional narratives change our perception of reality.

The work combines several photographic techniques and approaches: Staiger and Uchtmann have made photographs on the film sets of German crime series, overstageing scenes, leading to an abstraction of what is depicted contrasted with supposedly authentic imagery of corpses and crime scenes. In the portrait series various actors, who played victims and perpetrators in German crime series have been altered by artificial intelligence to create new possible versions of them, linked to the creation of phantom images in real police work. Furthermore, locations that have served as a movie set for a fictional crime scenes are documented as 3D reconstructions via photogrammetric methods, referring to the potential emergence of so-called 'fear spaces‘.

In the book, the artistic examination is complemented with texts by Karen Fromm, Image Traces: Forensic Media and the Documentary Gaze, and sociologists Aldo Legnaro and Andrea Kretschmann, Crime narratives as narratives of order.