He used to run a small commercial photography business, focussing on the “pretty stuff” in life; glamour, fashion, weddings, the list goes on. But now Rob Sorensen’s subjects involve dead bodies, victims of assault and fatal car accidents.
Rob is the only full-time forensic photographer for Nelson Police and is one of just 50 nationwide and it’s certainly not a job for the faint hearted, something he even admits himself. “Some people say ‘oh I’d love to be a forensic photographer’ but in reality they probably wouldn’t,” says Rob. “Homicides can be quite horrific but it’s not just the scene but the mortuary process afterwards, photographing the entire procedure. If they’ve got a lot of injuries, well you have to photograph all of them. But you can’t take it home, you have to be able to let it go and you can’t be emotionally involved.”
The job of a forensic photographer involves recording a scene as accurately as possible through his Canon 1D, or in Rob’s words “collecting evidence for the court”. Which could be why his hobby photography is more about positivity, creativity and things with much happier emotions. “With your own stuff you have license to do whatever you want. But with the police you must record everything as it is. It doesn’t matter if it’s a crash scene in the middle of the country and in the middle of the night and it’s pouring with rain, you have to record everything.”
Rob lists plane crashes as the worst scenes to attend, explaining the process of getting there often involves sitting in a helicopter with its doors removed. “You’re flying into an area where you know an aircraft has gone down but you don’t know why and it messes with your mind. It’s crashed and burned and now you’re flying in to the same area with no doors on.”
He attends around 1300 jobs a year, ranging from graffiti to murders, but says the hardest one to forget was a home invasion where the victim was stabbed 12 times but still survived. “There was blood everywhere, he ran through the home trying to get away from his attackers and there was just massive, massive amounts of blood. I went to see him two days later and he was up in bed talking, and two days after that I saw him walking in the street. I have been to jobs where people have died from one stab wound and here he was stabbed numerous times and being up and about.”
But it’s not just the images he sees and the things he smells which make being a forensic photographer a difficult job to stomach, the hours can be extremely long. While people might call it one of those jobs that ‘someone has to do’, Rob couldn’t think of doing anything else. “But it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.”
