New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive

New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive
by William Hannigan, Luc Sante

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Book Summary Information

Author: Luc Sante, William Hannigan
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-11-20
ISBN: 0847821722
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications

Book Reviews of New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive

Book Review: Pretty photos but not so interesting.
Summary: 3 Stars

I got this for my sister-in-law and was afraid it might be too graphic for her (she's a bit squeamish about blood). It's not nearly as explicit as I feared. Unfortunately, it's not as interesting as I'd hoped, either. Lots of pictures of rather anonymous people in very sharp clothing. I think she'll like it, but if you're already fairly used to postmortem or morgue photos, you won't be very impressed.

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Summary of New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive

During the golden age of tabloid photography--from the 1920s to the 1950s--photojournalists created some of the most innovate and enduring images in the history of photography. Photos of crimes and criminals, more than any other subject, captured the public imagination. Here for the first time is a selection of the most outstanding crime photographs from the archive of America's premier tabloid newspaper, the New York Daily News

Author William Hannigan demonstrates how these groundbreaking photos helped create the visual style that we now associate with film noir classics from Double Indemnity to Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Narrating the history of tabloid photography, Hannigan tells how hard-hitting pictures helped the Daily News win the tabloid wars on the 1920s, earning it the title of "New York's Picture Newspaper." An introduction by Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Evidence, examines the impact of these pictures on their original audience and how differently we see them today.

Capturing the mystery and drama of real-life "news noir," the photographs in this volume are both visually sophisticated and relentlessly revealing of human nature's dark side. An eloquent portrait of a city and an epoch, this book is not to be missed by crime buffs, photography lovers, or students of New York City's past.

When Ruth Snyder was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison in 1928, New York Daily News photographer Tom Howard was there--with a miniature camera he'd hidden under the cuff of his pants. The resulting snapshot made the front page the next morning (under the headline "DEAD!") and provoked fierce controversy among those wondering if tabloid journalism had finally gone too far. But, as Luc Sante points out in his introduction to New York Noir, a selection of pictures from the Daily News archives, the tabloids "retailed exclamation points"--Snyder in the electric chair was merely an extreme example of imagery that was a regular staple of the paper's coverage.

Many of the photos in New York Noir are not for the squeamish: corpses in the street or slumped in their car seats appear regularly, as do battered and bloodied criminals and suspects. But the power of these stark images is unmistakable--they are, as the book's title indicates, the raw material for the gritty vision of urban life that film noir popularized. For some people, tabloid crime photos are synonymous with Arthur "Weegee" Fellig; only one of his pictures graces these pages, however, and the other photographers represented here (many identified only by last name or no name at all) demonstrate that his reputation relies as much on promotional hustle as on artistic merit. Whenever possible, archivist William Hannigan supplies background information on the people and incidents in the pictures--but it is the images themselves, rather than the stories, that will stick in the reader's mind. --Ron Hogan

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