A collection of evidence photographs taken by the New York City Police between 1914 and 1918 is minutely annotated to express the social fabric of the times, the texture of the lives depicted, and the progress of the forensic use of photography.

Evidence

Politics & Social Sciences

SANTE, Luc

Social Sciences

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York

A now-classic portrait of the underside of America's greatest city, Low Life tells the true story of the growth of Manhattan, not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues and robber barons, but the turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums.

History

Americas

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A trip through Paris as it will never be again-dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemian Paris, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always accompanied by its shadow: the city of the poor, the outcast, the criminal, the eccentric, the willfully nonconforming. In The Other Paris, Luc Sante gives us a panoramic view of that second metropolis, which has nearly vanished but whose traces are in the bricks and stones of the contemporary city, in the culture of France itself, and, by extension, throughout the world.Drawing on testimony from a great range of witnesses-from Balzac and Hugo to assorted boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps-Sante, whose thorough research is matched only by the vividness of his narration, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour. Richly illustrated with more than three hundred images, The Other Paris scuttles through the knotted streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, through the improvised accommodations of the original bohemians, through the whorehouses and dance halls and hobo shelters of the old city.
A lively survey of labor conditions, prostitution, drinking, crime, and popular entertainment, and of the reporters, réaliste singers, pamphleteers, and poets who chronicled their evolution, The Other Paris is a book meant to upend the story of the French capital, to reclaim the city from the bons vivants and the speculators, and to hold a light to the works and lives of those expunged from its center by the forces of profit.

The Other Paris: The People's City, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Europe

A collection of evidence photographs taken by the New York City Police between 1914 and 1918 is minutely annotated to express the social fabric of the times, the texture of the lives depicted, and the progress of the forensic use of photography. Simultaneous.

Noonday Pr

O.K. You Mugs is a smart and stylish anthology of original writings on character actors--some famous, others not--who have left indelible marks on the movies and on our imaginations. Geoffrey O'Brien on Dana Andrews, Patti Smith on Jeanne Moreau, John Updike on Doris Day, Patricia Storace on Madhur Jaffrey, Dave Hickey on Robert Mitchum, Jacqueline Carey on Margaret Dumont, Greil Marcus on J. T. Walsh, Linda Yablonsky on Thelma Ritter--these are only a few of the twenty-six pairings of writer and actor included here, each one wickedly insightful and warmly appreciative. As Luc Sante (who profiles a "rogues' gallery" that includes Leo G. Carroll, Wallace Beery, and Nick Adams) and Melissa Holbrook Pierson (whose subject is Warren Oates) write in their preface: "As they reappear in one film and then another, it is as if they are returning in our very dreams: these characters take on character." In these lively and provocative essays, we are reminded in new and revelatory ways about what made these actors live so vividly on the screen. Wonderfully engaging, O.K. You Mugs is a singular contribution to the literature of film history and appreciation.

O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors

Humor & Entertainment

Pierson, Melissa

Movies

Pantheon

The Factory of Facts

"Like it or not, each one of us was made, less by blood or genes than by a process that is largely accidental, the impact of things seen and heard and smelled and tasted and endured in those few years before our clay hardened," writes Luc Sante. The Factory of Facts is his personal account of that process, less a memoir than an Identi-Kit self-portrait. Born in a factory town in southern Belgium in 1954, he was brought by his parents to the United States as a small child. Not quite knowing where he belonged, Sante grew up split: half in the old world, half in the new one, and resentful of both. His native land became ever more an abstraction, until he revisited it at age thirty-five. Suddenly he felt "as if I were taking a walking tour of my subconscious." So Sante becomes a detective, digging for clues to his childhood, to the lives of his parents, to the murky traces of his ancestors. He examines the social history of his native town, Verviers, which turns out to have been the home of his forbears for a millennium--a harsh industrial city, the birthplace of anarchists, autodidacts, and violin prodigies. And he looks at Belgium itself, an "artificial" country, "cast under the sign of ambivalence." The home of Magritte, Tintin, Brueghel, and Simenon is a puzzle, held together by its conflicts and contradictions. And everywhere Sante looks he finds little bits of himself. Navigating among the coordinates of time, place, and language, foraging through flea markets, scrolling through microfilmed documents, deconstructing stray photographs and anecdotes, Sante creates a superb work of remembrance and history. He comes to realize that he is the sum of a pile of accidents, capricious products of history and culture. The specifics of his story may be his alone, but its outline is shared by us all. In our era of political, cultural, economic, and technological convergences, The Factory of Facts brilliantly proposes a template for everyone's autobiography.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

From opium dens to the Bowery's suicide saloons, this lively, learned work of outlaw urban history ushers readers through the dark heart of New York City in the years between 1840 and 1919. "A systematic, well-researched historical account of . . . corruption, vice, and miscellaneous mayhem . . . well-crafted and tightly written. Boston Globe. 63 photographs.

Vintage

Though he is probably the world's most honored recent war photographer, James Nachtwey calls himself an "antiwar photographer," as the preeminent critic Luc Sante notes in his excellent foreword to Inferno, a landmark collection of 382 war-crime photos. Nachtwey has taken shrapnel and had his hair literally parted by a bullet, but he's never lost his compassionate outrage. The stunning images in this huge-format book--brutally abused Romanian orphans, Rwandan genocide victims, a rat-hunter family of Indian Untouchables barbecuing dinner, skeletal dehydration victims in Sudan, the miserable in Bosnia, Chechnya, Zaire, Somalia, and Kosovo--are excruciating to look at, yet impossible to tear your eyes away from. Nachtwey's art is meant to force us to face unbearable facts. Faces are the key: you can't gaze into the eyes of a Romanian toddler tied to a bed, or wired to a primitive "electromagnetic therapy" device, and not grasp the horror more fully than you would by watching a TV news item or reading a newspaper piece. (The book's text explains each photo's context.)Inferno is also a masterpiece in strictly aesthetic terms. The power of Nachtwey's images transcends journalism. Bloody handprints on a living-room wall in Kosovo, the ghostly imprint of a Serb victim's vanished body on a floor, a Hutu with crazed eyes displaying the machete gashes he received for opposing the Tutsis' butchery, a howling orphan in a crib, one eye contracted in anger--these are compositions that depend, like Goya's, on the artist's skill as much as the subject's legitimate claim on our conscience. Nachtwey's photographs make us capable of imagining that it could have happened to us. They are hard to forget, or forgive. --Tim Appelo

Inferno

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

Richard Prince emerged in the 1980s as one of America's new, highly innovative artists who worked with the margins of American subcultures and visual debris. Highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes, cartoons, cowboys (borrowed from the Marlboro ads) and motorcycle gangs - are central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, and had access to thousands of cut-up magazines of which only the advertisements remained intact. He began to re-photograph the advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly familiar, Pop imagery - updating Pop Art's homage to consumerism and its icons in the 1960s. Recently Prince's work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene.

Richard Prince (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Rian, Jeff

Brooks, Rosetta

History & Criticism

Five Great American Photographers Boxed Set: Matthew Brady, Wynn Bullock, Walker Evans, Eadweard Muybridge, Lewis Baltz (55s)

Johnson, Chris

HILL, Paul

Panzer, Mary

Bullock-Wilson, Barbara

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Books by SANTE, Luc