"Like the city they depict, the images are cryptic and unfinished, as though inviting us to supply the missing pieces, to complete the stories," he says.

"Suburban Noir", an exhibition of 200 crime scene photographs from 1950s and '60s Sydney, also features work by 15 Australian artists inspired by them. Doyle, who chose the artists, says: "I had a hunch that these particular artists would be as sucked in by the images as I had been. And they were."

And so in Susannah Thorne' s mixed-media work, , she sews the image of the body on the floor in the 1956 murder investigation shot that inspired her (the originals are displayed with the works). Chris O'Doherty, aka Mental As Anything musician Reg Mombassa, submitted one of his best-known artworks, . But is it a crime scene or an idyll of suburban domesticity? Displayed with it is a 1964 house picture captioned simply "Police Investigation".

"One thing about the images I'd selected, the police had a way of looking at things or places which sometimes brought out some deep, deep doubt or suspicion," Doyle says. "The weirdest, most disturbing photos were the ones where you had no idea what the drama was about - no bodies, no smoking gun, just a view, a way of seeing. Which is very much what a certain type of art tries to achieve - a way of seeing beneath the surface of things, a suspicious or at least doubting, ambivalent, complex take on the everyday and the banal."

Ironically, the car was the most lethal weapon in Australia in the decades covered by "Suburban Noir". More than half the police photographs of the time related to traffic accidents. In the late 1960s more than 3,000 people each year died in car crashes.

This is a fascinating, unsettling slice of Sydney history, the latest episode in a crime story Doyle has been involved in for more than a decade. An invitation to curate a Police & Justice Museum exhibition led to what has become something of an addiction, he admits - trawling the four tonnes of negatives, selecting, then piecing together the stories behind them.

From this emerged the first, extremely popular "City of Shadows" exhibition in 2005 and two books Doyle has produced featuring the images of crooks and conmen, the underbelly of Sydney from the 1920s to the 1940s. The collection, says Doyle, houses about 2,500 shots of actual and suspected criminals, many of them resembling portraits, some of the subjects so cuddly you could hug them, others handsome as movie stars. The exhibition became a sensation. Sydney people bombarded museum staff and Doyle with leads as to the subjects' identities and tales, which they have been following since.

The result: an updated "City of Shadows" exhibition, running concurrently with "Suburban Noir".

So we see not only the picture of confidence trickster Barbara Taylor, but we read of her gambling habit, property scams, the autobiography she hoped to sell to Hollywood and her sad end, an alcoholic confined to a mental hospital. And how do we know this story? When her mugshot appeared in the 2005 exhibition her great-great-grandson contacted the museum.

After the first exhibition photographs were also placed online and picked up not only by galleries across the globe but by fashion designers including the Ralph Lauren empire. It based a men's range on them and used the mugshots on the walls of its stores.

The presentation of both exhibitions is superb: informative, moody and evocative, accompanied by videos narrated by Doyle which feature many more photographs and illuminate them in thought-provoking ways.

"These were days when details of home life were not discussed in public and the front door was an almost total barrier between the public life of the street and the private life of the home. Fatal accidents and violent crime shattered that secrecy," Doyle says.

Forensics became important and police photographers strove to make accurate, inclusive records of intimate scenes. In doing so they created an enduring record of private life in Sydney at the time.