On 25 February 1988, a boy playing football with his friends near Philadelphia’s Central high school tripped over a decomposed body. When police forensics arrived at the scene, they found the remains of a young woman clad only in a blouse. Unable to identify her or determine the date and cause of her death, they commissioned a forensic artist to construct a likeness of her face by painstakingly sculpting features in clay and fibreglass on to a cast of her skull.

Although Philadelphia police circulated photographs of the result, no one came forward. The woman would have remained another of the city’s anonymous murder victims had not a cleaner, Lois Brown, retrieved a flyer from an office bin in 1990, intrigued by one of the illustrations. It was advertising an exhibition of forensic facial sculpture and the image in question bore a strange resemblance to her niece, Rosella Atkinson, who had disappeared, aged 18, three years earlier.

I'd be driven under armed guard to a police station and locked in a room for eight hours with the heads

Brown went to see the show and spent an hour in front of the exhibit. “Gradually, I began to see Rosella,” she said, “and I began to see Rosella’s mother Freedeina, and Rosella’s grandmother. I began to see the lines of the family.” Though other family members were unconvinced by the likeness, Rosella Atkinson’s identity was confirmed when a forensic dentist matched her teeth with her dental records.

Rosella’s face has an expression of almost sublime calmness as it stares out from the pages of Unspeaking Likeness, a haunting book of photographs by Arne Svenson. Like all the images of facial sculptures in the book, it appears both real and unreal, human and doll-like. “They do occupy that in-between space,” says Svenson. “For me, they have all sorts of resonances, not just traces of the person who once was, but aspects of both Victorian portraiture and early mugshots. Often, the likenesses have a quizzical look as if they are asking the viewer, ‘Who am I?’”

Svenson, who lives in New York, spent several years photographing forensic sculptures in America and Mexico, having come across one in the Museum of Pathology in Philadelphia in 1996. “I discovered this woman’s head lying on its side next to the dried leg of a horse. I was immediately intrigued. I found out later about the forensic artists who made these objects. It just seemed such a compelling subject.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Faces of a man and a child, from Unspeaking Likeness. Photograph: Arne Svenson

Svenson’s journey into forensic facial reconstruction inevitably led him to some dark places. In Juárez, he photographed the likenesses of some of the hundreds of young women whose bodies have been “disappeared” amid the ongoing violence of the region’s drug wars, prostitution and human trafficking. “I had to be vetted in America, but in Mexico, it was like being thrown into a hurricane of suspicion and violence. Every morning, a black car with blackened windows would turn up and I would be driven under armed guard to an isolated police station, taken up to the sixth floor and locked in a room for eight hours while I photographed the heads.

“There is the sense that people in very high places know more about these murders than they should. So I had to emphasise that I was there to be some comfort to the families of the missing – and not to help catch the killers. It was uncomfortable.”

Unlike the police photographs of the facial likenesses that are displayed in public sites across American cities, Svenson’s portraits are more formally composed and more chilling. Using lights and a tripod, he shot in stark black and white: in police stations, cold storage lockers, and an organ procurement room.

I wanted that quivering vibration between what is real and what is not

Often, he constructed shoulders for the heads to rest on from blocks of wood or coathangers, sometimes draping one of his own shirts over them. “Initially, I photographed the faces in sharp focus but I was always disappointed. Then I started focusing on the eyes, which is apparently what we do when we look at someone from about three feet away. The skin became less clay-like. I wanted that quivering vibration between what is real and what is not.”

At times, Svenson found himself almost overwhelmed. Once, while he was stuck in traffic in El Paso, a group of young girls approached his car, begging for money. “The faces seemed eerily familiar,” he writes in his afterword. “They were so similar to the heads I was photographing that I began to lose the distinction between the living and the dead.”

Only 12 of the 50 faces featured in Svenson’s book have been identified. The rest remain in that strange hinterland that attends the legion of missing. It is an uneasy place to enter even through the pages of a book. “As they stare out from these photographs,” Svenson concludes, “two questions must be asked for them: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who killed me?’”