Dead of Night

Bob Boltz's nighttime photographs of car crashes have a richness similar to that of 1930s black-and-white crime films. I like to think he may have been an admirer of movies like Scarface, with Paul Muni, and The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney. Each car is lit with a nightmarish, chiaroscuro quality. His framing matches the technique of horror and suspense films in which shadows provide gloomy details of the surroundings. The photographs remind me of genres where light and dark represent good and evil. This book is a hymn to unsolved mysteries discovered in the dead of night. -Diane Keaton