PUTTERMAN, Jaydie and Rosalynde LESUR. Police.

(New York, NY): Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. First edition. Softccover. 28 by 21.6cm. 192 pages. Over a period of six months, Jaydie Putterman and Rosalynde Lesur accompanied two patrol officers from Manhattan’s Midtown South Precinct, documenting both their working and private lives through an unflinching sequence of black-and-white photographs and first-person accounts. Long regarded simply as a documentary of police patrol work, the book is increasingly recognised as one of the more compelling photographic portraits of New York at the beginning of the 1980s. Beyond its depiction of law enforcement, it captures the inhabitants of Times Square and Midtown Manhattan—the hotels, bars, sex businesses, street life, and neglected urban spaces—during the final years before the wholesale redevelopment of Forty-second Street transformed the area. An evocative documentary photobook of a vanished New York. A very good copy in photo-illustrated wrappers.