Barbra Churchill | University of Alberta<\/p>\n

Hard-Boiled Tabloid:
\nHappily Low-Brow<\/h4>\n

There is an implicit critique of the American dream in works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, among others, a critique which also existed in the way the tabloid image of the gangster from the 1920s and 30s became part of a complex urban folklore which was to a large degree at odds with the dominant values of the middle-class.\u00a0Simon Bessie, in his 1936 book Jazz Journalism<\/em>, notes how the tabloids were read by all social classes, but I would argue that the front-page images spoke differently to different social groups.\u00a0 Erin A. Smith, for example, in her book Hard-boiled: Working-class Readers and Pulp Magazines<\/em>, has examined how working-class attitudes toward hard-boiled fiction differed from that of the middle- to upper classes, and the same can be said for tabloid photographs.<\/p>\n

Tabloid readers of the 1920s and 30s were \u201cpoachers\u201d (to use Michel de Certeau\u2019s term), who made their own meanings out of the photos of gangsters, in particular.\u00a0 Evasive readings often undermined the dominant privileged reading which was \u201cCrime does not pay.\u201d\u00a0 It is always tricky to attempt to reconstruct the reading practices of marginal readers and viewers who did not have meaningful access to cultural production, and who have left limited traces.\u00a0 However, the fact that the figure of the gangster, along with those evasive readings, remain entrenched in the popular consciousness does provide some understanding of how the gangster was perceived in the early days of his legend-formation.<\/p>\n

A recurring motif I encountered in scholarship on early-twentieth-century tabloid photography is the lament that tabloid photographs have been domesticated.\u00a0 To quote Penelope Pellizon and Nancy West, tabloid crime photographs have been \u201ctamed, removed from [their] working-class tabloid context, and polished up as a cultural relic[s]\u201d (Pellizzon and West 38).\u00a0 \u201cThe museum\u2019s interest in tabloid photographs,\u201d they say, is a class-conscious way of enjoying the visions of crime now canonized by academia, and further disassociates those images from the decidedly lowbrow tabloids (Pellizzon and West 23).\u00a0\u00a0 I asked myself if academia and museum culture really has the power to sever the images from their \u201clow-brow\u201d origins, since they have become so enmeshed in the popular visual repertoire.\u00a0 Is it not popular culture that has in a sense \u201ccanonized\u201d them?<\/p>\n

Geoffrey O\u2019Brien, in his book Hard-boiled America<\/em>, notes, \u201cUnlike the art that some critics may yearn for\u2014a self-sufficient structure with clearly defined limits\u2014these everyday creations are inseparable from life, are part of the definition of a particular moment they inhabit\u201d (O\u2019Brien 10). \u00a0Tabloid newspapers, with their front-page crime photographs of murderers and dead gangsters, were \u201ceveryday creations\u201d that defined a particular moment.\u00a0 Tabloid crime photography articulated a particularly pessimistic vision of American modernity, which O\u2019Brien aptly describes as \u201ca glittering hell ruled by money and violence\u201d (O\u2019Brien16).<\/p>\n

The American tabloids first appeared in New York in 1919 with the publication of the Illustrated Daily News<\/em>, followed soon after by The Daily Mirror<\/em> and the Evening Graphic<\/em>.\u00a0 The word \u201ctabloid\u201d referred to its compact size (almost half the size of the traditional paper) and its concise presentation of the news (Bessie 16).\u00a0 Unlike the more familiar supermarket tabloids of today (Nostradamous predicts\u2026or Angelina Jolie\u2019s extra-marital affair\u2014and the baby that is NOT Brad Pitt\u2019s), the early tabloids covered a wide range of material\u2014from quick synopses of conventional news to crime and lurid scandal.\u00a0 The tabloid was the city paper par excellence, a commuter paper for working-class city dwellers.\u00a0 According to Bessie, \u201cThe contents of a page could be grasped at a glance and the whole paper could be handled with ease in the most crowded subway\u201d (Bessie 83).<\/p>\n

As Bessie notes, what made the tabloid especially distinct was its exploitation of the \u201cgraphic eloquence of the camera\u201d (Bessie 99):\u00a0 \u201cwith the exception of a single headline and some small type, the front page was covered entirely with pictures\u201d (Bessie 16).\u00a0 The front page was often a dark vision of American modernity, a \u201cceaseless manipulation of the ancient curiosities in Love, Death, Sin, Violence and Money\u201d (Bessie 43-44).\u00a0 During the Jazz Age, detractors claimed the tabloids were a menace which would produce nothing but soiled and rotten minds (Bessie 213).\u00a0 This fear was rooted in a shift taking place from conventional journalism to photojournalism, a concern that images had the power to circumvent the word, a possibility that was gleefully trumpeted by the tabloids themselves: for example, the leading editorial in the first issue of the Daily News<\/em> proclaimed, \u201cThe story that is told by a picture can be grasped instantly\u201d (quoted in Bessie 84).\u00a0 No need for the concentration and effort required by elite viewing practices.\u00a0 This was an art of distraction, as Benjamin would put it.<\/p>\n

During the 1920s and 30s, the crime rate in New York soared, and as tabloid newspapers increased their crime coverage, their sales rose accordingly.\u00a0 It was a time when \u201cCrime paid,\u201d and \u201cpictures of crime paid even more\u201d (Hannigan 17).\u00a0 Bessie claims that embalmed in the arresting tabloid photographs \u201care the happenings and persons which comprise the folklore of [the] times, more so than conventional newspapers because from the start the tabloid identified itself completely with the common people\u201d (Bessie 17).\u00a0 The story told in a photograph of a dead gangster, combined with the concerns and interests of the \u201ccommon people\u201d, comprised a particular folklore of fatalism, a critique of the American Dream for those who had been largely denied access to that dream.<\/p>\n

Arthur Fellig (also known as \u201cWeegee the Famous,\u201d a tabloid photographer at this time), noted in his autobiography, that when it came to crime photos, \u201cthe bloodier and sexier the better. [The] millions of readers had to have their daily blood bath and sex potion to go with their breakfast\u201d (Weegee 40).\u00a0 Commenting on his image \u201cGang Gets Revenge\u201d (1939), Weegee writes: \u201ca just-shot gangster, lying in the gutter, well dressed in his dark suit and pearl hat, hot off the griddle\u2026\u201d as Weegee put it (Weegee 37).\u00a0 Weegee points out how well-dressed the gangster is: as Erin Smith and David Ruth have noted, the gangster\u2019s apparel had powerful symbolic associations.\u00a0 The dream of American social mobility rested on visible consumer choices, and this particular \u201cjust-shot\u201d gangster, Louis Cohen, dons polished shoes, an expensive suit, a silk scarf, and felt hat.\u00a0 He uncannily resembles a respectable businessman whose only error was to be caught alone and without the \u201cprotection\u201d of a larger corporate bureaucracy.\u00a0 More importantly, Louis Cohen was able, through \u201cdishonest\u201d means, to shed class markers: leaving the ghetto and purging those ethnic traces that tended to restrict the social mobility of those who were \u201chonest\u201d (Ruth 63+).\u00a0 Louis Cohen is a morally ambiguous figure.<\/p>\n

Tabloid photographers were trying less for artistic effect than for full coverage\u2014a \u201cmeaty story\u201d concentrated in one image.\u00a0 They needed to include as much information as possible in the frame.\u00a0 For example, in \u201cDropped on the Spot\u201d by Willard, a New York gangster lies dead on 46^{th<\/sup> and 10th<\/sup>.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a synthesized image that readers could understand at a glance.\u00a0 No need for much explanatory copy, except to identify the gangster as David (the Beetle) Beadle, from \u201cHell\u2019s Kitchen\u201d.\u00a0 Circumstance has also lent the photograph a good dose of black humour: in front of The Spot Bar and Grill, \u201cThe Beetle\u201d was placed \u201con the spot\u201d (slang for \u201ckilled where he stood\u201d) and a street sign prompts us to be mindful of the Law: \u201cKeep your sidewalk clean\u201d and \u201cNever sweep refuse into the street.\u201d\u00a0 Clive Scott terms such an image a \u201crebus image\u201d in which the photographer \u201cframes the shot to capture a street sign or writing within the image.<\/em> The writing functions as ironic commentary on the represented actions, as if the world is captioning itself\u2026.\u201d \u00a0It is unavoidably simplistic because the image\u2019s meaning depends completely on the viewer\u2019s getting the encoded \u201cpun\u201d (quoted in P&W 40).<\/p>\n}

But the viewer\u2019s interpretation of this pun depends on the viewer\u2019s subjectivity and position within the social hierarchy.\u00a0 The dominant or preferred reading is obvious: \u201cCrime does not pay.\u201d David the Beetle Beadle is no better than litter, street refuse: he is a criminal.\u00a0 Seen from another point of view, his crime was that he contributed to the erosion between social, ethnic and criminal class distinctions.\u00a0 Folklorist Richard Meyer, when discussing the figure of the outlaw (which gangsters were), comments that the death of the outlaw reveals the \u201cschizophrenic tension between optimism and fatalism which is so often a feature of those who perceive themselves as downtrodden\u201d (115).\u00a0\u00a0 Like Louis Cohen, David the Beetle Beadle had become a glamorous consumer, an optimistic, yet morally ambiguous, vision of the American Dream.\u00a0 His death, however, reinforced the idea that this dream was a hollow illusion: he was reduced <\/span>to litter, to street refuse, despite his entrepreneurial aspirations.<\/p>\n

These cheap, mean deaths were nightmarishly distended by the process of reproduction (Sante 9).\u00a0 Multiple copies of these front page photos appeared on newsstands, in shops, on the subway, a serial repetition that existed daily.\u00a0 According to Benjamin\u2019s \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u201d photography\u2019s power to shatter tradition rests on its reproducibility: a plurality of copies exists instead of an \u201coriginal.\u201d\u00a0 The singular uniqueness of an original work of art, its presence, its \u201caura,\u201d facilitates its becoming part of museum culture.\u00a0 As Benjamin was quick to point out, even with photography\u2019s power to evade cult value, cult value does not give way without resistance (Benjamin 225).\u00a0 Benjamin acknowledged that even with an absolute emphasis on exhibition value, the artistic function may be recognized later (Benjamin 225).\u00a0 Such is the case with Weegee\u2019s photos.<\/p>\n

The domestication of the tabloid photograph began with the photographer, and publicity hound, Weegee the Famous.\u00a0 While the photographs he took existed as a plurality of copies, with their shriveled aura, he compiled his New York photographs into a 1945 book titled Naked City<\/em>, which became a best-seller.\u00a0 The disposable, tabloid photographs, destined for the trash bin, when placed in book form became the promise of durability.\u00a0 The book also offered the possibility of becoming \u201chigh art\u201d.\u00a0 Weegee\u2019s image \u201cCorpse with Revolver\u201d (1936)\u00a0 appears to be a \u201cstill life\u201d of a corpse, revolver, and boater hat on blood-paddled pavement.\u00a0 Cult value requires a focus on the composition of the image, not the drama.\u00a0 According to Luc Sante\u2019s introduction to New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive<\/em>, the \u201calchemical transformation of passing trivia and historically moot tragedy into art is a process accomplished by the viewer, who adds a decisive distance that confers upon the photographs a condition opposite to that of their origins.\u00a0 The viewer looks at obscure individuals and sees archetypes, looks at chaos and sees design\u2026\u201d (Sante 9).<\/p>\n

The provocative power of the tabloid photograph, however, can not be divorced from a larger popular folklore.\u00a0 As Sante notes, it is the viewer who adds the \u201cdecisive distance\u201d, but only if the viewer exists in a bubble.\u00a0 The images of Dominick Didato, Lois Cohen and David Beadle, call to mind endless movies: from the 1931 film The Public Enemy<\/em>, to The Godfather<\/em> (1972) to The Untouchables<\/em> (1987), to Goodfellas <\/em>(1990), as well as the popular television show, The Sopranos<\/em>.\u00a0 Some of these photographs have made their way into the 2007 graphic novel, Criminal.<\/em> The fascination with images of the gangster from tabloid photography rests on the drama, the rise and fall of the urban outlaw.\u00a0 Such images were free of academic restraints when they were created, and despite attempts to polish up these visions of crime, they happily remain decidedly \u201clow-brow\u201d.<\/p>\n