Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City comprises photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations so hauntingly described by Chandler in his novels. From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill, these locales form the geography of Chandler's imagination, and conjure a world not yet entirely vanished. Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles that "when he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it." But Chandler was also drawn to the Hopperesque loneliness of the city, to that sense of isolate existences that never merge. In these photographs, Catherine Corman (editor of Joseph Cornell's Dreams) has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes."
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The city of crime and misdeeds that Chandler describes in his seven novels endlessly wrapped in a tormented chiaroscuro, a stagnant air of nervous cigarette smoke, a profound maelstrom of solitude and mystery, is the same atmosphere you breathe while dipping into Daylight Noir...an intense visual tribute to the noir master that unfolds through...strongly evocative images, constructed of details that subtly convey distress, that contrast the disquietude of shadow and light; geometric compositions that seem to suggest a further, secret truth. The City of Angels has never been so dark. --Vogue Italia
The book is magical...a section of tile-roofed bungalow glimpsed between branches, the Art Deco façade of an old hotel seen against a sun-white sky, a flight of wooden steps ascending toward palm trees...these buildings are haunting, and haunted. Ms. Corman captures the essence of Chandler that still hovers throughout L.A. --The Wall Street Journal
Catherine Corman and others stake out Raymond Chandler's literary haunts. --Vanity Fair
Like a camera that can only see in infrared, Corman has attuned her sensibility to view only what lies within the Chandlerian spectrum...the photographs are beautiful. --Virginia Quarterly Review
It's a gorgeous book. --The Seattle Stranger
"Daylight Noir is a tour of Marlowe's Los Angeles at high noon...[the] aura is largely on loan from Chandler. He's like a noir Midas: every L.A. address mentioned in his stories turns to black...[giving] the feeling that one is at the terminal end of the continent, renting a short-term apartment in last-chance city...These are places more ephemeral than they first appear." --Rollo Romig, New Yorker Photo Booth blog, Oct. 7, 2010
The book is magical...a section of tile-roofed bungalow glimpsed between branches, the Art Deco façade of an old hotel seen against a sun-white sky, a flight of wooden steps ascending toward palm trees...these buildings are haunting, and haunted. Ms. Corman captures the essence of Chandler that still hovers throughout L.A. --The Wall Street Journal
Catherine Corman and others stake out Raymond Chandler's literary haunts. --Vanity Fair
Like a camera that can only see in infrared, Corman has attuned her sensibility to view only what lies within the Chandlerian spectrum...the photographs are beautiful. --Virginia Quarterly Review
It's a gorgeous book. --The Seattle Stranger
"Daylight Noir is a tour of Marlowe's Los Angeles at high noon...[the] aura is largely on loan from Chandler. He's like a noir Midas: every L.A. address mentioned in his stories turns to black...[giving] the feeling that one is at the terminal end of the continent, renting a short-term apartment in last-chance city...These are places more ephemeral than they first appear." --Rollo Romig, New Yorker Photo Booth blog, Oct. 7, 2010
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
No better than "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles",
By
This review is from: Catherine Corman: Daylight Noir (Paperback)
Sorry. This book which has the MSRP of $39.95 plus tax for a paperback (which you can now buy on Amazon for about 25% of that) is no bettter than the 1998 work referenced above. This kind of junk can be slap-dashed together with a few Phillip Marlowe books and modern boring black-and-white pictures of mainly downtown high-rises, is boring, just plain boring.
If you weren't there, you'll never know. If you want to let your imagination run wild into places that no longer exist, see "Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" and my related review. This one falls flat on its face. Where is the romance, the intrigue, the "real noir"? Not here.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Black and White of Chandler's Los Angeles,
By
This review is from: Catherine Corman: Daylight Noir (Paperback)
Raymond Chandler set his stories and novels in a Los Angeles that sometimes seemed to me to be part of an alternate universe. The city was still recognizable but something was always just a little off about it. Chandler created his striking version of Los Angeles so successfully, in fact, that it often seemed more real, if rather more odd and dangerous, to me than the real city streets of L.A.
I followed Chandler into his Los Angeles before I ever saw the real thing for myself and I was somewhat disappointed by what I saw when I finally got there. The two cities, real and imagined, just did not match up all that well for me. After having read Catherine Corman's photo-filled "Daylight Noir," I know for sure that the problem was entirely my own. "Daylight Noir" is filled with moody black and white photographs of many of the locations prominently featured in Chandler's work, photos as arresting as the images created by Chandler himself. My problem was that I was looking at Los Angeles through modern eyes and in living color. Corman solves that problem by producing all of her photos in high contrast black and white, just as they might have been photographed in Chandler's heyday. The reader will note, too, that there are no people in any of the pictures, a tactic that further enhances the feeling of big city loneliness so common in Chandler's work. Catherine Corman has an artistic eye and her photographs reflect that artistry. They are shot from unusual angles, only rarely straight on, and yet have the look of pictures that could have been taken in the early decades of the last century. Corman's photos tell me more about Los Angeles than any of those thousands of self-promoting, touristy, pictures I have seen over a lifetime. As a bonus, they also remind me why I love Raymond Chandler's work so much and they make me anxious to revisit his stories for the first time in a long while. "Daylight Noir" is the perfect companion piece to Raymond Chandler's mysteries and I plan to keep it near my Chandler collection so that I can refer to it the next time I crack open one of his hardboiled stories. "Daylight Noir" should appeal equally to fans of photo collections and to fans of the remarkable work of Raymond Chandler.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
beautiful photos and excellent tribute to Chandler's noir Los Angeles,
This review is from: Catherine Corman: Daylight Noir (Paperback)
Catherine Corman's "Daylight Noir" photos of Los Angeles landmarks from
Raymond Chandler's novels capture the palpable unease that permeated the landscape of LA during the Depression and WWII. As LA and the rest of the country face the worst economic crises since WWII and a chronic state of low level warfare in the Middle East, "Daylight Noir" uncannily speaks to our times with its message that no illusion is kept without a price, and whether we can afford this price remains to be seen.
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