Evidence: NYPD Crime Scene Photographs: 1914-1918

by Lucy Sante

In Evidence, Luc Sante, the author of Low Life, offers an eerie, insider's visit to the scene of the crime. This collection of rarely seen evidence photographs, taken by the New York City Police Department between 1914 and 1918, presents startling images, some brutal, some poetic and all possessed of a strange and spectral beauty. In his introduction, Sante explains his attraction to this murderous gallery: "Here was a true record of the texture and grain of a lost New York, laid bare by the circumstances of murder. Lives stopped by razor or bullet were frozen by a flash of powder......

Genres: Photography, True Crime, Nonfiction, Crime, History, Art, Research

99 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1992

About the author

Lucy Sante was born in Verviers Belgium and emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. Since 1984, she has been a teacher and writer, and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her publications include Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, and The Factory of Facts and Folk Photography. She currently teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College in New York State.

Reviews

[Punk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non-Fiction. Fifty-five black and white photographs taken by the New York Police Department during the beginning of the 20th century, presented without commentary or context.

Edward Gorey, in an interview with Clifford Ross, said of the photographs:

They're ravishingly beautiful crime scenes. Sometimes the corpse and everything. There's a completely fortuitous, Surrealist aspect to a lot of them. They were taken with a camera pointed to the floor on a tripod so that you can see the three feet of the tripod, and sometimes the feet of the photographer. And some completely inexplicable photographs of just a street at night. "Is this a blood stain in the foreground or isn't it?"

Taken with a wide-angle lens and bright flash, foggy with time, the photos are indeed surreal. Even the ones without a dead body seem ominous, as if the photographer knew something the viewer doesn't. Proportions are distorted, making common objects like a radiator seem six feet tall, but foreshortening staircases into a compact two or three. The flash gives the subject a halo effect, bright light in the center of the frame that tapers into shadows at the edges, but in many, the focus isn't even on the body. Instead, the camera will be focused on some seemingly insignificant piece of scenery, inevitably drawing the eye to the object, giving a rolled-up rug leaning against a wall a heavy sense of importance, never mind the dead body at its feet. In the photos taken from above, you can indeed see the legs of the tripod, but they're distorted too, like long metal stilts, eerie, bizarrely alien. In the long shots, blurry figures stand to the side, sometimes only their feet or a disembodied hand visible, sometimes looking vaguely toward the camera, their white faces indistinct, almost threatening.

After a while, the scenes develop a sense of sameness to them, the same dirty hallways, scrubby vacant lots, minuscule tenement apartments, almost uniformly lower class, places where the poor live or frequent. And the bodies, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes crumpled up against a wall, barely visible. Most of them just look asleep, vulnerable and awkward on the ground or in their bed, but in a photo of two men at the bottom of an elevator shaft, one of the young men has his eyes and mouth open, his hand pressed to his temple, and looks anguished, but deep in thought. Later, Sante compares him to a Romantic poet engaged in contemplation, a surprisingly accurate description.

In the back of the book, Sante shares what little information he has for each photo, sometimes it's just a street number or part of a name, sometimes he can connect the scene to a likely newspaper article, but even then details are sketchy, and vary from one paper to another. I could only look at a few of these at a time before I started to feel a little ill; it's not so much the photographs themselves -- they're less gruesome than your average CSI -- but Sante's helpless speculation about who these people were and what happened to them. They were real people and many of them no longer have names attached to their murdered bodies. I felt sad for them, sick that their lives ended this way, and that the photographs of their death became so divorced from the lives they'd lived.

While Sante's comments on the origin of each photo are simple and respectful, the prose in the introduction and afterword is completely overwrought, like twenties noir pulp fiction. It's barely readable. He does have some insightful things to say about the style of the photographs, the use of light and composition, and how those things contribute to their sense of mystery. But my god, the trite philosophizing! It was completely out of place. I think he was just trying to create some meaning out of what he'd discovered while digging around the New York City Municipal Archives, maybe even to offer it up in exchange for his trespasses, but I found it in poor taste.

Four stars. As a study of human nature, these photographs are brutal and heart-breaking. As artifacts of their time, they give us a silent history of the poor and disenfranchised. As art, aesthetic works, they're mysterious and powerful and pull the eye in unexpected directions.

[Amelia Kibbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: do not read before bed.

This astounding collection of NYC crime scene photos were discovered by Sante in a forgotten archive where they were spared the fate of others who were thrown away or dumped into the river when buildings and departments moved.

Collected here for you are postmortem photos meticulously curated by Sante, chosen by someone with a strong sense of poetry and reverence for and identification with the anonymous dead.

Sante pairs the images with whatever information he could find about the victims depicted, which is scanty at best. Also after the collection he allows himself to speculate about the dead and the America they lived and died in. He draws the reader in by challenging them and acknowledging the exploitation of their gaze, as well as musing on the nature of photography itself.

"Through the act of looking, we own these pictures, or, rather, they thrust themselves upon us... to look at these pictures is to glimpse the work of the recording angel on the day of judgement... these pictures are documentary evidence of an end we are afraid to recognize."

This is a remarkable thing.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old-timey crime scene photos of dead people.

[The Elf of the Ostfront Harlot of Eros Hannahlore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gutter symphony of poignant raw gelatin silver darkroom plates printed gorgeously and in rich tonal black and white, no muddy mid-tones Santes printer at least in my edition lovingly captured the details and surprises which hide in each frame as you navigate from early twentieth-century crime photography as he braces his brownie box camera on stilts and langojrs with death for a while.
A delight for the morbid lovers of inner city miasma and historical depravity, a must have following in line with Santes keen eye for the morbund and floridly beautiful.

[Royce Ratterman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great historical overview filled with a treasure trove collection of evidence photographs and descriptions, which follow the full-page photos..
Read for personal research. Overall, a good book for the researcher and enthusiast.
I found this book's contents helpful and inspiring - number rating relates to the book's contribution to my needs.

[Diana Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another look at history

Fascinating look at the history of photography use in forensic evidence. Background of the people in the photographs (as possible) and people who took the photos and investigators

[Amber Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting photos of crime scenes from early 1900s New York. I wish there were more photographs, but we do get back stories and commentary from the author about most of the photographs.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. Long-forgotten black & white crime photos from NYC 1914-1918. Author has tried hard to track down the stories behind the photos. I also find what’s in the background to be intriguing … a glimpse into that person’s life and the times.

[Mr. Roboto]

Fantastic foreward by Luc Sante. I used to be really into these books of crime scene photos. (What does that say about me?) Now I feel like a disrespectful voyeur when I see them. This book did illuminate the difference between how black folks and white folks were treated when photographed by crime scene photographers. Black men often had their pants pulled down and genitals exposed by the photographer. The photos in this book are decades old, so I'm glad the days of this sort of treatment are over and crime scene technicians just photo what they find.

[Dereck · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting and unusual book. It's not somethign for everybody. It's a bit haunting, a bit serious, a but artsy, and a bit emotional. The whole thing is one amazing collection of photographs of murder victims of the past.

[Aaron the Pink Donut · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely beautiful book of black and white image of murders and suicides from the early 1900’s New York. Amazingly powerful images.

[Jena Lacomis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Historians, Documentary Lovers, Photographers, Journalists

[leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book with quite the story behind its publishing.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing photography.

[Mab · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this really haunting because it gave each photos was so eerie. Pretty gruesome pics, but somehow I could put the book down. This book is not for everyone.

[Ray Dunsmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating connection of crime scene photos - a selection culled from a surprisingly small window of evidence from the 1910s (apparently, to make room for future records, the NYPD threw most of their antique records into the East River). What comes through is shockingly gorgeous. Scenes of brutally murdered women, dead animals and gangland hits are imbued with a striking poetic beauty. The strong magnesium flash highlights every detail, but somehow, the strongest light seems to come from within the victims themselves, positively glowing in gruesome beauty. The body of a man thrown down an elevator shaft somehow ends up in a pose that conveys a strangely confident air, like that of a Romantic poet reclining on a divan. A pregnant dog, likely beaten to death in a subway station, laid dead on the crumbling concrete tiles, is caressed with an almost loving radiance from the flash light. Many of the stories have been gleaned from old newspaper clippings, but nothing ever manages up against the stories the viewer concocts, trying to make sense of the senseless. Highly recommended for anyone interested in true crime stories, turn of the century America, or the possibility of beauty in the darkest possible moments of life.