Dark City. The Real Los Angeles Noir

Dark City brings together images from archives, museums, newspaper photo morgues, private collections, and the author's extensive image library to reveal the true grit, grime, and sheer horror stories of Los Angeles from the 1920s to 1950s, offering a unique visual history of the city's crime, crooks, crazies, and mean streets.

Format: Hardback
Length: 480 pages
Publication date: 14 March 2018
Publisher: Taschen GmbH

Los Angeles, a city that had been transformed from a backwater town to a gleaming metropolis and city of the future following World War I, began to experience a tarnished patina on its ever-more glamorous façade in the years that followed. As thousands flocked to the city with their dreams and desires, so too came get-rich-quick schemes, phony religions, organized crime, and corruption. Dark City brings together images from archives, museums, newspaper photo morgues, private collections, and the author's extensive image library to reveal the true grit, grime, and sheer horror stories of Los Angeles from the 1920s to 1950s. In large format, we roam through the back alleys, gin joints, tattoo parlors, gambling dens, nightclubs, and the most brutal crime scenes to uncover a city crawling with murder and mayhem. From Sunset Boulevard to a jazz-saturated Central Avenue, tabloid headlines chronicle the most famous celebrities and infamous crimes in a hopped-up city that provided inspiration for journalists, pulp fiction scribes, and filmland script writers in their creation of the noir genre. With rare vintage magazine reprints from the crime tabloids of the time, this is a uniquely evocative visual history through which the crime, crooks, crazies, and mean streets of the City of Angels are transformed from myth to reality.

Weight: 2752g
Dimension: 298 x 263 x 54 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783836560764