Evidence
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
Following Low Life, Lucy Sante's acclaimed evocation of the underside of New York City's history, Evidence is an investigation into the mysteries of crime, death, and photography that only this brilliant and original writer could conduct.
In one sense Evidence is a picture book - a collection of 55 evidence photographs taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918. These are startling images, some brutal, some poetic, and all possessed of a strange and spectral beauty.
Lucy Sante minutely examines these pictures of crime scenes and draws them out by every possible means: speculating about the lives and deaths depicted; discussing the progress of the forensic use of photographs and the mission of photography itself; and, where possible, reconstructing the events that led up to these frozen terminal images. Evidence is many things at once: aesthetic object, historical and sociological document, mystery novel, memento mori, and time machine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This slim volume contains a haunting collection of 55 black-and-white crime scene photographs made primarily between 1914 and 1918 by New York City police detectives investigating murders and suicides. Sante discovered this archive while researching Low Life, his history of the seamy side of old New York; he notes that these pictures survived when they were overlooked by workers who cleared out the former Police Headquarters in the mid-1980s by dumping most of the records into the East River. While Sante diligently attempts to resurrect the stories behind these images, readers learn less about what happened than about where it happened: about the bedrooms, hallways, railroad tracks, subway stations, cellars and barrooms of New York City 75 years ago.
