Comments on: Signal 30

By: Comtesse

Comtesse — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:52:49 +0000

@Rev. Syung Myung Me This sounds awesome. I will have to post this on the main page too. Thank you for sharing this.

By: Comtesse

Comtesse — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:51:48 +0000

@Nicholas Dollak Death Scenes is another amazing book – one of my favorites – and I am well aware of the photo you mention. However, I can’t say that I am aware of a study to that effect. Perhaps you should start one?

By: Comtesse

Comtesse — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:50:54 +0000

@Jim Thank you for sharing this. I just added it as a main post so no one would miss it!

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:53:40 +0000

Additional images, recently discovered Kilpatrick images and article (Weegee of the West)

http://dulltooldimbulb.blogspot.com/2009/08/mell-kilpatrick-weegee-of-west-and.html

By: Nicholas Dollak

Nicholas Dollak — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:27:55 +0000

I have a book called “Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook,” which is a facsimile copy of a VERY gruesome photo album kept by a Los Angeles detective during the late 1940s – mid 1950s. Quite fascinating, but profoundly disturbing (esp. the pictures of dead children). Anyway, there are a number of car wreck photos in it, including at least one in which the driver was decapitated. Apparently this was not uncommon in the days before seatbelts. The head or heads in all photos are “standing” in the road — that is, the stump of the neck is on the ground. It looks almost as though the victim were buried up to the neck in asphalt. This has led me to wonder if a freely-tumbling severed head has a tendency to land right-side up…? Does anyone have data on this? As a writer who sometimes writes horror, this would be a useful gruesome fact to know.

By: Rev. Syung Myung Me

Rev. Syung Myung Me — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:38:18 +0000

On a similar tip to the _Car Crashes_ book, have you ever seen Negativland’s book/CD _Deathsentences of the Polished & Structurally Weak_? It’s one of my favorite things they’ve ever done, and, well, I just about adore almost everything they’ve ever done. The CD isn’t the thrust of the project — though it’s not bad, it’s not sample-based, and really noisy, so something different than you’d expect from them — the book is.

The book is a collection of photos; they went to junk yards, and took photographs of car wrecks, then looked in the wrecks for detritus of their previous owners. The layout is the car on the left page of the spread, the item on the right, along with a transcription of what it says (as random people’s handwriting is often hard enough to read when it’s not on crumpled paper taken from old, wrecked cars). It’s REALLY cool — I highly recommend checking it out.