Pulp Pix: The Bizarre Case of Photography Noir – American Museum of Photography
The evidence is purely circumstantial, but it seems likely that our friend Laurelle picked up photographs that were meant for several different true-crime and detective genre magazines published in the years after World War II. It’s difficult to know whether these pictures are all the work of a single photographer or even a single studio, but at least some of the images were taken at the Fawcett Studio in New York’s Studebaker Building. And it’s reasonable to think that studio was affiliated with Fawcett Publications.
Fawcett Publications was a multi-million dollar media empire that began in 1919 with a joke book called Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Fawcett was an innovative company, creating the mass market for paperback books and launching a lucrative line of comic books (including those featuring “Captain Marvel.”) Some of its true-crime and detective magazines outlasted the Great Depression, World War II, and the Korean War.
The great 20th century pulp magazines featured not just true crime and detective fiction, but also superheroes, Wild West themes, romance stories, fantasy and science fiction. By the late 1940s all of these genres were beginning to find new homes — on television. The success of that glowing box in the living room marked the doom of the pulps. So it is perhaps a little ironic that when Fawcett Publications was sold in 1977, the buyer was the broadcast company CBS. Five years later, CBS divested Fawcett, or at least its book division, selling it to Ballantine Books (itself a division of Random House, which is now part of the Bertelsmann Media Group.)
Today there is surging interest in the pulps, whose writers included Edgar Rice Burroughs, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane. Original illustrations used for cover art have been exhibited in museums and are eagerly sought by collectors. But very little has been said about the dark and unsettling “true crime” photographs that also illustrated some of the pulp magazines.
Perhaps that’s because “Photography Noir” never really disappeared. The hyper-dramatic re-staging of events has featured in the works of art photographers like Les Krims and Cindy Sherman, and even some fashion photographers such as Guy Bourdin (1928-1991). It is, of course, impossible to stage reality — a conflict that infuses both the original illustrations and their newer incarnations. And yet, these pictures are compelling because they manage to convey emotions and tell stories, all while walking a tightrope between truth and fiction.
You don’t have to be a tough guy to appreciate a balancing act like that.
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