Strange Days, Dangerous Nights: Photos from the Speed Graphic Era
by: Larry Millett and John Sandford

Hardcover. St. Paul MN, Borealis Books, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 224 pages. The photographs in this collection are taken from the files of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the St. Paul Dispatch, and span a period from the nineteen-forties to the mid-sixties. Among the many records of long-forgotten civic functions are shocking crime-scene photographs, a reminder of an era when the country's newspaper photographers--an army of Weegees, equipped with oversized Speed Graphic flash cameras and radios tuned to the police scanners--regularly provided readers with lurid coverage of violent crimes and spectacular accidents. There is a harsh intimacy to these photographs, which bring us as close as possible to car-crash victims, suicides, and mass murderers confessing their crimes. But the welter of detail in the pictures--the seamed stockings of a murder victim, the huddle of bystanders after a bar shooting--provides a nuanced portrait of a Midwestern city and of American culture at mid-century.