Weegee (Phaidon 55's)

Named after the "Ouija board" for his uncanny ability to arrive at the scene of a crime before the police, Weegee recorded the dark side of New York's streets. No sordid crime seemed to escape his flash and no crime was too gruesome to capture on camera for the papers the next day. Weegee's understanding of people's simultaneous repulsion and attraction to vivid photographs of crimes of passion, murder, brutal accidents was well before his time. Even today, his photographs still have the power to shock, and the originality of the images has elevated them in importance far beyond the newspapers he worked for.