Strange Days, Dangerous Nights: Photos from the Speed Graphic Era - Hardcover

A woman stabs and kills her husband and then cradles his body--Members of the National Guard patrol city streets during a labor strike--A house lies in ruins following a natural gas explosion--A decapitated corpse sprawls on the ground in front of a factory--Terrified residents make their way down a fire escape as their hotel burns--A young woman stares into a mirror attached to her iron lung--With an eye for the picture that tells a story, Larry Millett has collected 220 of the best of these "noir" images. These newspaper photos that capture the nitty-gritty era of the Speed Graphic camera are like a slice of Minnesota life. Here are nighttime murders, car-crash victims, the St. Paul Winter Carnival, hotel fires, celebrities, drowning victims, union picketers, tornadoes, floods, the strange twists in everyday life, and the pre-urban renewal vibrant downtown St. Paul. Millett has also scouted out many strange and amusing photos from the supposedly "happy days" of the 1950s. "Fat men's" races, fall-out shelters, and fake "ndian"bands were among the strange rituals of the era.In the two decades after World War II, and especially during the 1950s, photographers from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and St. Paul Dispatch cruised the city in search of dramatic visual images. Equipped with the legendary Speed Graphic, a large-format camera capable of producing richly detailed prints, the newspapers' dozen or so staff photographers took thousands of black-and-white pictures, many of them startlingly graphic. The photographers often worked closely with the police and had a remarkable degree of access to crime scenes and criminals. This allowed them to produce images--of blood-soaked murder victims, drowned children, bodies strewn around accident scenes, houses blown to pieces--unlike anything seen in newspapers today in a visual style that could be blunt and powerful.Strange Days, Dangerous Nights includes detailed captions that tell the story behind each picture. This book is unique; there is nothing else like it for the region.Visit the book at http://www.mnhs.org/exhibits/strangedays/index.htm

"The photographs in this book are endlessly fascinating . . . we get a taste of almost everything, from the hilarious to the tragic, from the silly to the murderously bloody." -- from the foreword by John Sandford "Today, [these images] still speak to us through their vivid immediacy, their graphic exploration of the dark side of urban life, and their sometimes appalling richness of detail. Stolen from lost moments in the history of the city, they have the power to pull us back through time to a world at once intimately familiar and surprisingly strange." -- from the introduction by Larry Millett