Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8881587246 ISBN 13: 9788881587247

Publisher: Charta, 2009

Synopsis

Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City comprises photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations so hauntingly described by Chandler in his novels. From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill, these locales form the geography of Chandler's imagination, and conjure a world not yet entirely vanished. Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles that "when he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it." But Chandler was also drawn to the Hopperesque loneliness of the city, to that sense of isolate existences that never merge. In these photographs, Catherine Corman (editor of Joseph Cornell's Dreams) has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes."

About this title

Review

The city of crime and misdeeds that Chandler describes in his seven novels endlessly wrapped in a tormented chiaroscuro, a stagnant air of nervous cigarette smoke, a profound maelstrom of solitude and mystery, is the same atmosphere you breathe while dipping into Daylight Noir...an intense visual tribute to the noir master that unfolds through...strongly evocative images, constructed of details that subtly convey distress, that contrast the disquietude of shadow and light; geometric compositions that seem to suggest a further, secret truth. The City of Angels has never been so dark. --Vogue Italia

The book is magical...a section of tile-roofed bungalow glimpsed between branches, the Art Deco façade of an old hotel seen against a sun-white sky, a flight of wooden steps ascending toward palm trees...these buildings are haunting, and haunted. Ms. Corman captures the essence of Chandler that still hovers throughout L.A. --The Wall Street Journal

Catherine Corman and others stake out Raymond Chandler's literary haunts. --Vanity Fair

Like a camera that can only see in infrared, Corman has attuned her sensibility to view only what lies within the Chandlerian spectrum...the photographs are beautiful. --Virginia Quarterly Review

It's a gorgeous book. --The Seattle Stranger

"Daylight Noir is a tour of Marlowe's Los Angeles at high noon...[the] aura is largely on loan from Chandler. He's like a noir Midas: every L.A. address mentioned in his stories turns to black...[giving] the feeling that one is at the terminal end of the continent, renting a short-term apartment in last-chance city...These are places more ephemeral than they first appear." --Rollo Romig, New Yorker Photo Booth blog, Oct. 7, 2010

Edition details

• Publisher: Charta
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8881587246
• ISBN 13: 9788881587247
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128