Christian Boltanski is a self-taught French artist who first came to critical notice in the late 1960s through his short, avant-garde films that combined real and fictional evidence of his and other people’s lives. In the 1970s, Boltanski began using photography to explore memory and consciousness, often by creating assemblages of documentary photography removed from its original context. The artist wrote of Detective:

I cut the images from a specialized review of crime stories. The photographs—which are similar to those in our own photo albums—are as if from a play, and the people we see in them are the actors, assassins or victims. But it is impossible to differentiate among them, now that the images have been isolated from their context.