Marcel De Baer Archive

From 1961 to 1980, Marcel De Baer (Geraardsbergen, 1922-2014) was a collision expert for the public prosecutor’s office of the district of Oudenaarde, Belgium. In this capacity, he came at the scene of every major traffic accident that took place in the area to report on what had happened based on photos, measurements and technical drawings. Since De Baer kept a copy of every file intended for the court for his own archive, these were preserved until now. After De Baer’s death, a total of approximately 4,000 reports and ten thousand images – both prints and negatives – were found by his grandson Erik Bulckens in his grandparents’ attic. These pictures of a.o. skid marks, chalk lines, car wrecks, scratches, dents and even blood spatters, to which De Baer added arrows, numbers and annotations that correspond to descriptions in the original files, provide an insight into how he analyzed and reconstructed accidents. Since most crashes took place in the early hours, few people can be seen here. In these strangely stilled images, the metal seems to lie almost peacefully in the morning mist, contributing to the film noir atmosphere the photos radiate. Other images do show human presence in the form of groups of bystanders, or police officers who perform re-enactments of what happened in a somewhat surrealistic way. The latter provide, presumably unintentionally, some comic relief.