Not So Pretty Pictures

I love me some gritty pictures. A few years back, when everyone discovered Vivian Maier's photographs of day-to-day life in Chicago, I couldn't get enough of them, but it doesn't stop with her. There's a lot of dirt in the world and plenty of photographers to capture it.

Gangsters & Grifters is a series of gloriously reproduced newspaper pictures displaying the awful things Chicago criminals did to each other in the first half of the twentieth century. Dug up from the basement of the Chicago Tribune, the pictures include plenty of gore and sad scenarios, such as two women in bathing suits posing in front of John Dillinger's corpse.

Wisconsin Death Trip takes a collection of newspaper clippings and photographs from Black River Falls and manages to make 1890s rural Wisconsin look like an epidemic of diphtheria, arson and insanity. The book is too much fun to flip through and comes complete with some surprisingly insightful essays.

Tulsa was made over a period from 1963 to 1971, as photographer Larry Clark recorded his friends spending a good deal of time shooting themselves up with amphetamines and whatever other drugs happened to be on hand. The book's blunt realism inspired movies like Taxi Driver, and Larry Clark himself went on to make the equally controversial Kids.

But unlike gritty movies, this is real photography, and these are real people. These are haunting books.