Customer Reviews

Evidence

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
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This is a collection of crime scene photos taken by the New York City Police Department between the years 1914 and 1918. Sante's commentary is clear and consistently well-written. The fascination here is that viewing these images is similar to the feeling one gets when looking through very old snapshots in the attic of a house belonging to an older relative. But the strangely voyeuristic sense one always gets while looking at old photographs is magnified in this book exponentially, and the experience becomes a distinctly chilling, almost uncomfortable one. Although certainly not for everyone, this book is nontheless unique and darkly wonderful.

The photos in this assemblage are really awful -- I could hardly stand to look. The relief is in reading the commentary, which is a series of lucid, appropriately concise themes on crime, death, material culture, memory, randomness and order -- and the versatile and vital craft of photography.

A compelling collection of crime scene photographs taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918. The images are always intriguing, often mysterious, sometimes artistic, occasionally shocking, and reliably graphic. The appendix contains a detailed explanation of all known facts regarding each image (include applicable newspaper clippings) and much reasonable speculation on those images where the facts are lost to history. Highly recommended for the morbidly curious and fans of morbid history, alike!

a clear a concise book of early 1900's crime scene photos with interesting text. not for the faint hearted. very graphic stuff including an image of a dead pregnant dog.

I wish I could write as beautifully as Luc Sante. Since he is Belgian, I assume English was not his cradle language. If that's right, then as an ESL stylist he ranks with Conrad and Deutscher as a master of prose style.

Of content, not so much.

There's something about a photograph that makes intellectuals go all runny inside. They start worrying about what's outside the frame, or what would have been in it just before or just after. Conceptually, a photograph is no more instantaneous than, say, a diary entry. But nobody worries about what Pepys left out.

A photograph is what it is. No need to make a big production number out of it.

Sante tries. Like the photos that end up in Found magazine, the pictures in "Evidence" are random. The New York police threw away decades of crime photographs. A few hundred escaped and Sante, who wrote the delightful "Low Life" about New York's seamy side, found them and selected 55 on, he says, purely aesthetic merits.

Fine. Nothing wrong with that. But if that was the purpose, why the text?

Well, of course, we don't look a police photographs as if they were Mark Rothko daubs, utterly without intellectual content. We expect them to tell a story.

In a few cases, Sante is able to match a picture with a story as reported in newspapers of the day. Others are completely unidentifiable and mysterious. So what does Sante do? He does what anyone would do -- he makes up stories to fit.

That's all there is to it. His ruminations about how we justify looking at these pictures are beside the point.

Some, it's true, are gruesome, but others, which have a gruesome story behind them, are on the surface peaceful. They could be of someone sleeping on a bed. We know they are dead not asleep, and the knowledge makes the difference. The photographs themselves are indifferent.

This is especially the case of shots of vacant lots.

Sante makes one good point. Since the events were unrehearsed, nobody straightened up the rooms (or warehouses, hallways, streets) for company. These photos are curious, unbuttoned (often, literally) documents of how people lived in New York City 90 years ago.

Evidently, the originals were highly detailed. Sante was able to read headlines on newspapers or printing on bits of paper scattered around, and thus to date or otherwise explain some of the scenes. The reproductions in the book lose all that.

There are plenty of other published collections of police photographs. Or war photographs. Nothing except their artificial rarity and the éclat of the Big Apple raises this little collection above the average of the others.