Shots in the Dark: True Crime Pictures - Softcover

Gail Buckland is the author of eight books of photography and history. She held the Nobel Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College in 1991 and is an Associate Professor at The Cooper Union in New York City.

This is a stark exploration, in archival photography and crisp commentary, of the full range of criminal darkness. Prepared by Buckland (who teaches at Cooper Union and is coauthor of The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography, etc.) with commentary by Evans (The American Century), the volume commemorates the 10th anniversary of Court TV along with a documentary series of the same name, which begins airing this month. The book is organized by subject matter ("Crime Scenes," "Killers," "Sensational Cases," "Retribution," "Gangsters," "Presidential Assassins"), while the authors' essays and captions provide deeper discussion of forensic photography's development and evolution in the American consciousness: the '40s noir landscapes of tabloid photographers like Weegee; shocking images from the public domain, like the surveillance pictures of Patty Hearst committing robbery with the SLA; or bootlegged autopsy photos of Dillinger and JFK. The photos are comprehensive and well selected, offering a plethora of jarring images, human horror and guilty thrills. Snapshots of notorious and obscure killers provide concrete portraits of the banality of evil, while the rapist/murderer Harvey Glatman's photos of his bound victims evoke safety's fragility. As this book owes a measure of its flavor and some specific images to earlier anthologies of crime photography, notably Luc Sante's Evidence (1992), it arguably represents an incursion of once-marginal "crime culture" into the mainstream. Buckland and Evans offer an elegantly rendered coffee-table volume of depraved indifference and needless sorrow. 200 b&w photos (Oct.)Forecast: Fans of Law and Order, viewers of the Court TV series and other mainstream crime buffs will line up to buy this slick, attractively produced collection.

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