If you are a serious collector of early photos,this is not the book for you.Besides the terrible organization of photo subject and type reference,some of wich have no reference at all,some of the photos would probably be already quite familliar to you,and are all done over in this sepia like tone instead of their true colors.As well,some of them are not quite so early.The text is taken from books of other people who have done great works on crime photogrphy,(Eugenia Parry),and so are the photos.if you want artsy,you might appreciate it.If you want a serious book on early photos of crime or the like,don't waste your money

While the photographs here were shocking, they were also exploitative. Just because they are old does not lessen the impact of photos of murdered children and freaks of nature. I am not sure what this book wanted to do, but it did not do it well. It is like reading a book version of the trashy Faces of Death video series.

Joel Peter Witkin is long established as a master of the visually bizarre, creating studio photographs that push the envelope of believability to the precipice and then encourage the viewer to accompany the descent. They are manufactured by the artist. But here Witkin has gathered bits of real life that far exceed the contrivances of his own photography. Distorted and leaning toward nauseating as some of these real life photographs from history may be, they are all the more strange because they are Documentation instead of Creation. And who better to compile this odyssey into the dark realm but the man who spends his creative energies devising fabricated scenarios that parallel these photographs? A fascinating survey of just how untameable is this planet we call home........