Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir - Softcover

Reviews from: Ray Gun Los Angeles Times So you've seen L.A. Confidential more than a few times and you're itching to know more about the City of Angels' seedy side? In Sins of the City, Jim Heimann collects tabloid shots taken at morgues, mafia murder scenes and marijuana heists plus some sweet ol' amateur porn thrown in for good measure. Perfect browsing material to keep next to the can at your swing club. By Jonathan Kirsch Jim Heimann is the man to see in Hollywood if you are making a movie that is set in Southern California in bygone times he combines the skills of an archivist, a cultural anthropologist, a designer and a historian, and he knows where to look for a dusty photographic relic that shows what any corner of byway of Los Angeles looked like on a particular day in the past. Heimann's remarkable skill set is put to good use in Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, a beguiling collection of black-and-white photographs that depict the demimonde of Los Angeles from the '20s to the '50s. What the photographer Weegee did for New York in his classic Naked City, Heimann now does for Los Angeles. Sins of the City proves that the depiction of Los Angeles in countless-noir movies and hard-boiled detective stories was not merely the work of an overheated imagination. Her are real-life cops and robbers, gangsters and gambler, strippers and hookers, clairvoyants and charlatans, starlets and the occasional authentic star, all of them captured by a corps of photographers who roamed the meaner streets of Los Angeles with Speed Graphic cameras in hand.

Jim Heimann is a graphic designer, illustrator, and educator whose previous books include California Crazy: Roadside Vernacular Architecture, also published by Chronicle Books.