The artistic integrity within ‘The Big Combo’

1. The artistic integrity within ‘The Big Combo’

2. The crime photographs of Weegee "He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful." - William McCleery in Naked City

3. Although Weegee photographed a wide panorama of urban life, the documentation of violent crimes, disasters, and their survivors and onlookers was Weegee's specialty. His work for New York City newspapers and photo syndicates in the 1930s and 1940s brought him international attention. His best-known images have a rawness and spontaneity rarely encountered.

4. The city streets of the 1930s were a brutal place. Heavy shadow captured in black and white film reflected the use of Chiaroscuro from the Renaissance period of painting that also enhanced the brutality of the time.

6. Chiaroscuro - A word borrowed from Italian ("light and shade" or "dark") referring to the modeling of volume by depicting light and shade by contrasting them boldly. This is one means of strengthening an illusion of depth on a two-dimensionalsurface, and was an important topic among artists of the Renaissance.

7. Judith by Caravaggio Note the heavy light and dark and consider the dramatic effect

9. Death of Marat by Jacque Louis David (Consider time 1hr 3mins and 18 sec of the Big Combo)

10. ‘Death of Rita’ by John Alton – note the placing of the cigarette (Consider time 1hr 3mins and 18 sec of the Big Combo)

11. Experiment with a bird and pump by Joseph Wright of Derby Consider 1hr 11min and 53 sec of the Big Combo

12. Note the similar foreground light source Consider 1hr 11min and 53 sec of the Big Combo

13. Nighthawk by Edward Hopper (Consider 0 hours 6 mins 44 sec of the Big Combo)

14. Nighthawks Oil on canvas, 1942; 84.1 x 152.4 cm Friends of American Art Collection, 1942.51 Edward Hopper said that Nighthawks was inspired by "a restaurant on New York's Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet," but the image, with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale. One of the best-known images of 20th-century art, the painting depicts an all-night diner in which three customers, all lost in their own thoughts, have congregated. Fluorescent lights had just come into use in the early 1940s, and the all-night diner emits an eerie glow, like a beacon on the dark street corner. Hopper eliminated any reference to an entrance, and the viewer, drawn to the light, is shut out from the scene by a seamless wedge of glass. The four anonymous and uncommunicative night owls seem as separate and remote from the viewer as they are from one another.

15. Nighthawk by Edward Hopper (Consider 0 hours 6 mins 44 sec of the Big Combo)