A portrait should not look like a mug shot. Unless it happens to be a portrait of a mug shot.

Step inside Rogues and Vagabonds, an exhibition now showing at the Queensland Police Museum in Brisbane City, and you’ll see what we mean.

It features a series of works by Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Tiernan, who just happens to be a talented artist as well as a cop. The collection of 20 paintings reimagines historic mug shots and reveals the lives behind each face.

DCI Tiernan brings decades of investigative experience into his expressive portraiture, which explores story, struggle and humanity. He has spent a career studying people in moments of pressure, vulnerability and consequence. Away from frontline policing, he studies people through paint.

The collection draws on historic criminal mug shots from Queensland and NSW, but rather than presenting the subjects as figures frozen in a single moment, DCI Tiernan reimagines them with depth and emotion. His expressive portraiture invites viewers to look past the official record to the person behind it. The exhibition is unique.

The research process was fascinating. DCI Tiernan says he chose mug shots from the archive dating back, at times, a century, adding that it was safer that way with no possibility of recriminations from the crims themselves or their families.

“One of the interesting things is that photography was relatively new then,” DCI Tiernan says. “They were allowed, at times, to dress up in their Sunday best to be photographed. One woman posed in the fur coat that may have even been the one she has stolen.

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“I wanted to choose a subject that wasn’t usually represented in portraiture. I saw these mug shots and wondered what they would look like colourised.”

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He worked quickly on each one to capture the essence of the person he saw in the mug shots he perused from police archives.

Each picture tells a story, as they say. Take the one of William Harrington Croker who began his long criminal career as a teenager in 1928, when he was first charged with vagrancy in Toowoomba. More vagrancy convictions, each resulting in a month or more in jail, followed over the next two years before Croker was found guilty of stealing the overcoats of two men in 1931.

Croker went to jail but never quite managed to go straight afterwards. An alcoholic and drug addict (Croker had ransacked dental surgeries in search of a fix), he was nonetheless well dressed, living off the earnings of his wife.

Domenico Scarcella, another Queensland mug shot, and his accomplices Mario Strano and Salverio Militano, were charged in 1933 with child stealing and the abduction of Elizabeth Margaret Rosarti.

Of the three, Militano was sentenced to 12 months hard labour, Strano was found not guilty and Scarcella was sentenced to six months hard labour, suspended after the judge’s recommendation for mercy. While living on a sugar-cane farm on Stone River Road, eight miles (13km) from Innisfail in FNQ, he was murdered a couple of years later. It came to light that he was reputed to be a member of Italy’s notorious Black Hand Society.

At age 19, Annie Gunderson (a NSW mug shot) was charged with stealing a fur coat valued at £5, 10 shillings, from Winn’s Limited, a prominent Sydney department store, on May 18, 1922. She was bound over to appear for sentence if called within 12 months, meaning that she was released on the condition of good behaviour during that time.

Gunderson does not appear in the police gazettes again. Police records do not indicate whether the fur coat she is wearing in her photograph is the stolen item, but Tiernan prefers to think it was.

DCI Tiernan first turned to art in 2014 while recovering from a car accident. It sparked a passion that has grown alongside a long and varied career serving his respective communities.

He served in the British Army then worked with Northumbria Police in the UK before joining the Queensland Police Service in 1997.  His roles have included undercover work, homicide investigation, Taskforce Hydra, fraud, cyber-crime and major and organised crime cases.

In the art world he has been shortlisted for major portrait prizes including the Brisbane Portrait Prize, the Archibald Salon des Refusés and the Percival Portrait Prize. His earlier exhibitions have explored themes drawn from his life including boxing and the people he has known through policing.

Rogues and Vagabonds showcases this perspective through a series that encourages visitors to see beyond the mug shot and appreciate the full story each face may hold.

A detective by profession, DCI Tiernan is an artist by passion – a combination that lends his artwork a powerful sense of authenticity and intrigue. As a DCI within the Queensland Police Service Crime Command, Tiernan’s professional life revolves around understanding human behaviour in its starkest and most complex forms.

This forensic view of humanity deeply informs his art, transforming the raw and real into deeply evocative visual storytelling.

With a Bachelor of Fine Art to his name, Tiernan is currently pursuing a Master of Visual Art at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art and Design.

Rogues and Vagabonds is on show at the Queensland Police Museum, 200 Roma St, Brisbane City, until March 6.

police.qld.gov.au/museum