The history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century swarms with swanky gangsters like Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Bonnie & Clyde, who embodied the mythical golden age of outlaws. They grabbed the headlines of national and foreign newspapers, inspired biographies and movies about their misdeeds.
But you won’t find any of them in this book, which is about another set of criminals. For there was a host of plain and unsung characters, “nobodies,” like John T. Honeycutt, Marion Barhart, Charles Jefferson, and Irene Kelly, among others, who, in the same period, spread terror, grifted, and murdered. They merited only a few articles in local papers. Then they sunk into well-deserved oblivion.
The book Gangsters, published by Heredium, presents some 200 photographic portraits of the era. The images constitute a rare record, for the most part published for the first time, of run-of-the-mill criminals. The work brings together press photos, snapped in the heat of the moment just as the suspects were being delivered to the precinct, in police custody, or facing a judge. These documents are full of realism and humanity.
In addition to evoking the acts committed by those base souls, the volume reveals another face of the United States, fractured by the Great Depression. What comes through these images is a picture of a cinematic America, an underworld America, with all its sordid reality, showing desperately common people caught in the wheels of a ruthless era. It’s a searing testimony of the nameless.
Gangsters, by Christophe Leflot
Published by Éditions Heredium
