Police Work

Leonard Freed
Police Work

Photographs: Leonard Freed

Text: Studs Terkel

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

126 pages

Pictures: 124

Year: 1980

Price: 90 €

Comments: Softcover. 275 x 215 mm. Black & White photographs. In good condition. The cover has a few scratches and moderate signs of wear, as well as a crease on the spine that affects the last six pages. The binding in the middle of the book is slightly loose (See pictures)

Police Work is an eloquent, positive, grittily realistic portrait of the life of big-city policemen.Through 124 black-and-white photographs, Leonard Freed has captured all the power, irony, compassion, violence, rewards and revulsions of police work. Freed spent many months with policemen on their beats, watching ; taking photographs ; building a story about the police that shows the isolation, the complexity, the camaraderie, the many dimensions of their work and what it takes to be a "good cop" - intelligence, nerve, understanding, the ability to make lightning decisions of life-and-death proportions. Short, understated captions accompany some of the photographs, but the story is in the images : neighborhood life ; stalking suspects ; runaways ; hustlers ; derelicts ; demonstrators ; drug busts ; prison ; kids...

Moving, devastating, sharp, tragic, at times almost overwhelming, here is an unparalleled view of police and work and life.