Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

HOW CRIME COULD SAVE NEWSPAPERS


That's a real life crime scene above. This bathroom was the scene of a murder.... I don't know the particulars. If you're like me you won't be able to resist staring at it, maybe in the superstitious belief that a location can have a malevolent personality and can be a collaborator in violent crimes. Isn't that what Stephen King was getting at in "The Shining?" 

I covered up the gory part of the photo with scrap paper. That's because I want to demonstrate that even an empty room can be interesting if it's known to be the locale of a crime. Still pictures can be an amazingly effective medium for things like this. A newspaper might devote a whole 20% of a page to an empty crime scene photo like this.

  Newspapers are always looking for a way to stay relevant and one way to do that is to up their game by making their crime reporting more exciting. Big cities are plagued with crime and this is a way to turn a liability into an asset...well, sort of.

   
Newspapers can't compete with TV for breaking news, or with computers for quick summaries, but they're great for pictures people want to study, like the mugshots above. Readers like to linger on the faces of people in the news, even if those people are criminals. We're all interested in life's other side.


Newspapers also have the advantage that line drawings have more impact on pulp paper than on computer screens. I'm not sure why. Maybe the tactile grit of the paper has something to do with it. Maybe McLuhan's theory that imperfect definition increases viewer participation explains it.

I've long believed that newspapers should have an artist sketch what the police speculate happened at a crime scene. Of course the sketch only illustrates a first impression and may be made irrelevant by new facts as they emerge.


Lots of readers are amateur sleuths and they'd appreciate diagrams like the ones above.


Here's (above) a police shootout. No doubt the photographer risked his life to get the picture. Police should allow news photographers the freedom of movement necessary to get pictures like this.


Of course there's always the possibility that exciting crime reporting may inadvertently encourage wrongdoing. To counteract that the paper would generally show things from the point of view of the police. The worst kind of sociopathic career criminals would be treated in print as rats and predators.


Better crime reporting should be supplemented with daily photo essays emphasizing ordinary life in the big city. Here's an excerpt from a Life magazine essay in which a cameraman followed a doctor, a general practitioner, as he made his rounds during the day.


From a different essay here's (above) two women getting ready for a day at the beach. Good photographers can find a lot to shoot, even in surroundings as common as this one.


Thursday, December 12, 2013

STILL MORE NEW YORK CRIME PHOTOS

Can you take a few more crime photos? I warn you, it's grim stuff, not for the faint of heart.


We'll start with a crook being transported by the police. He hides his face from the photographer, no doubt because he doesn't want his mother to see the photo in the paper.


Above, Brooklyn teenagers reveal the armor they tried to wear to a rumble.


Above, a homicide victim...killed in his own apartment by a shot through the window. The picture was taken in 1925. 


Across town another man was murdered, also in his own home. Police always take at least one photo from directly above a corpse in the belief that this conveys more information than any other kind of shot. 


Maybe one of the murder victims was killed by one of these men (above). They're professional hitmen. Here they clown around for the camera, maybe in the belief that their lawyer will get them off. In this case they were wrong.


In 1960 John Favara (above, left), a neighbor and friend of mobster John Gotti (above, right), accidentally ran over and killed Gotti's twelve year-old son. A few months later Favara was kidnapped and "chainsawed" to death.


Yikes! A convict's bleak funeral in the mudflats.


Above, another hoodlum being transported by the police. The guy looks contemplative, as if he can see a vision of the horror awaiting awaiting him in prison. Imagine it...years away from the rest of the world, locked up in a cage with violent crazies.


Pictures of criminals were hard to get in the 19th Century. They just wouldn't sit still.


Flashbulb photography changed all that. Here's (above) the wife and child of the man who kidnapped Lindberg's baby. This was taken the day after his execution.

Probably newspapers can't run this kind of picture in our day. In my opinion that's a mistake. The news is made more exciting by pictures like this.


Was this a crime? Maybe it was just an accident. Imagine being a policeman and having to see things like this day in and day out.


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These photos were sampled from two interesting books: "Shots in the Dark" by Gail Buckland and Harold Evans, and "New York Noir."


Tuesday, November 19, 2013

NEW YORK CRIME


These are all pictures from a recent book of old New York Post photos called "New York Noir."

The Post's staff artists frequently drew recreations of crimes using the real backgrounds.  Here a man temporarily blinds his victim by throwing pepper at her.


Here (above) a woman has been shot by an unknown sniper.


This man (above) has been recaptured after a jailbreak.


This guy's wife caught him cheating so she gathered up the kids and threatened to leave him. That never came to pass because he shot her. One impulsive act changed his life forever.


Above, a policeman looks on as two tough kids (above) take a cigarette break. Two soon to be wasted lives.

In this picture a whole family has been wiped out. But why? No one knows.


Above, two cop killers after interrogation.


I'm supposing this man was a well-known criminal of the time. Here (above) a Physiognomist offers her opinion about why the man went wrong.


This dapper gent (above) is, believe it or not, the District Attorney. He dresses the way crooks in the movies dress.


Wow! New York used to look like one big noir movie set. I wish it still did.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

CRIME, LOWLIFES, MURDERERS

What other animation site reports on the seedy urban underworld as often as Theory Corner? 

Here you'll find suspicious characters.


Gritty industry.


Jealous husbands.


Ex-friends.


Blighted lives.


Capture!


Coquettes.


Lowlifes.

Juvenile delinquents.


Thugs.


Secret societies.

Hot muggy nights on the fire escape.


Murder on the waterfront.


The first light of morning.


The milkman delivers.


Morning coffee in a rush.

The maid arrives for work.... 

....and discovers a body.