Photography is extremely important to crime scene investigation because it establishes what the crime scene looked like at the time that investigators got there.  This is extremely important for helping investigators to truly understand what the crime scene looked like in its totality.   It is also important for showing a jury the same thing so that they can have more of a feel for what the evidence looked like at the scene.

One of the main goals of crime scene investigation is to understand exactly what happened at the scene.  Photography helps to make this clear.  Good pictures of the whole crime scene and of the individual pieces of evidence preserve the crime scene in a sense so that investigators can go over it again and again in ways that they could not do with the actual physical scene.  Photographs allow investigators to look at exactly where each object was found and what was around it.  This allows them a much more complete understanding of the events that happened than they would have if they only had the evidence separate from its context.

Once the case goes to trial, good photographs can be important as well.  They can give the jury a clear sense of what the investigators found, making the investigators’ case seem more compelling.  For these reasons, photographs of a crime scene are very important.