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    Murder in the City: New York, 1910-1920
    Murder in the City: New York, 1910-1920
    Murder in the City: New York, 1910-1920
    Ebook248 pages1 hour

    Murder in the City: New York, 1910-1920

    By Wilfried Kaute

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    About this ebook

    When night falls on New York, the shadows are everywhere and death wears many faces. How the victims leave their bodies is deeply personal, but the witnesses to their death and the factors that brought it about belong to the public world—a somber world which is encapsulated in this gruesome survey of crime and violence in the 1910s.

    Parts of the city that are today among its trendiest neighborhoods were once the battlegrounds of evil forces, which left their mark in unforgettable ways. Here, newspaper clippings, police reports and testimonies are placed alongside the scenes that they describe, fleshing them out and giving life to the departed.

    Complete with an introduction from German actor and writer Joe Bausch, this book is a must for anyone who has ever anxiously imagined how dark an activity like dying can be—and isn’t that everyone?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 13, 2017
    ISBN9781250128706
    Murder in the City: New York, 1910-1920
    Author

    Wilfried Kaute

    WILFRIED KAUTE, born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1948, works as a cameraman, film producer, and author in Cologne. His projects include many award-winning films and TV productions. Murder in the City: New York, 1910-1920 is his first book.

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      Book preview

      Murder in the City - Wilfried Kaute

      MURDER

      MUGSHOTS

      MOST

      WANTED

      Crime scene photography revolutionized policing in New York in the 1910s. This book collects forgotten pictures and newspaper articles from a lost era.g

      BY WILFRIED KAUTE

      Time and time again, the role that chance and forgetfulness play in criminal cases isn’t to be underestimated. Every investigator can tell stories of witnesses who appear out of nowhere, objects that have fallen out of someone’s pocket or stray items of clothing that have proved to be damning evidence against the offender.

      In fact, the very existence of this book is ultimately down to chance. During the renovation of the former police headquarters in New York City, hundreds of large-size glass negative plates were discovered in a small room. Among them were crime scene photographs taken between 1910 and 1920.

      Today the images of this forgotten chamber form part of more than 900,000 historic items that the Department of Records – the New York City archives – has digitized and made accessible. The oldest of these documents date back to the mid-19th century. There are maps, ciné film and audio files, but mostly photographs. They usually do not come from trained photographers, but from engineers, firemen, administrative staff or policemen, and they documented public projects, the recording of damage, accounting, and often transport and urban planning interests.

      By dint of their simple objectivity, these photographs impressively depict the growth of the city. Then still ‘gateway to the New World’, New York in these photographs is on its way to becoming the first real ‘mega-city’.

      The crime scene photographs included here are particularly special. According to police authority rules, the images, once finished with, ought to have been dumped, without the public’s knowledge, in the Hudson Bay – disposed of in the same way as confiscated weapons or gambling machines. But the scheduled destruction of the photographs was simple: they were forgotten about.

      Thus they found their way into the collection of the ‘NYPD & Criminal Prosecution’, one of the largest photographic collections on criminology.

      THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S TASK WAS TO DOCUMENT PRECISELY AND WITHOUT EMOTION

      At the end of the 19th century, photography, though still emerging itself, revolutionized solving crimes and played an important part in the fledgling field of forensic science, which was based on scientific methods and the teamwork of evidence gatherers, fingerprint experts, police photographers and coroners. The object of crime scene photography was to document what happened, precisely and without emotion. As quickly as possible, the photographer had to be at the scene of the crime, secure and unaltered, where he usually took two photographs: a long shot showing the whole room with the victim, and a close-up of the corpse. For the close-up, the camera was positioned directly above the body. Due to the strong wide-angle lens used, the feet of the photographer and the legs of the camera tripod are often visible in the image. The photographs were initially for the exclusive use of the police investigation, after which they could be used as evidence in court. Often they told a clearer narrative than the detectives’ statements ever could – stories of cruelty and brutality.

      However, crime scene photographs are not the only kind of criminological photographs in the NYPD’s collection. Even so-called ‘mugshots’ are included as they are still used in the identification procedure of suspects, and more recently thrust the odd celebrity involuntarily into the public eye.

      Now, as then, anyone arrested is photographed front-on and in profile. Whether guilty or innocent, the suspects have to submit completely to the camera without moving. How petrified their faces can appear while being photographed. Some seem arrogant and presumptuous, others injured and confused.

      Subject: Crime and criminals, Murder

      Description: Homicide/male, close up of victim

      Date: 1916-1920

      Format: 8 x 10 inches, glass-plate negative

      Title: Copy Henry Monroe photo & measurements

      Subject: Crime and criminals

      Description: Copy photo

      Date: 1916-1920

      Format: 8 x 10 inches, glass-plate negative

      Condition: paper stuck to emulsion

      That none of the images at the time was intended for the public is part of their appeal.

      Mugshots also exercised a great fascination for the artist Andy Warhol. In 1964, before his famous portraits of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he released his work Most Wanted Men, in which he processed 13 pictures of the NYPD’s most wanted criminals. It went down in art history as a milestone in pop culture.

      Past mugshots are now coveted collectors’ items, rare vintage photographs that fetch high prices in galleries and at auctions. In the USA in particular, contemporary mugshots are popular. They can be seen on webpages with headlines such as ‘364 people who were booked in the last 24 hours’. Costing a dollar, the magazine The Slammer is exclusively dedicated to such photographs. Page after page, in hundreds of thousands of copies, pictures of fugitive perpetrators and suspects can be seen, while the innocent are not infrequently submitted to public exposure and

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