Mob Moll, 1933: Being married to a hitman will almost always get you into trouble, and no one knew that better than Lottie Coll, wife of Irish mobster Vincent 'Mad Dog' Coll. Here, Coll holds her scarf to her face as she is arraigned in court in 1933. It was taken in 1933, and like the best archival images it needs almost no explanation — the frame tells its own story.
The 1930s were shadowed by the Great Depression, which put a quarter of American workers out of a job at its worst point. Yet the same decade produced streamlined trains, record-setting aircraft, grand public works, and a flood of documentary photography as magazines like LIFE sent cameras into everyday America.
What makes everyday photographs like this one compelling is the details at the edges: the clothes, the signs, the tools, the postures. They preserve texture that history books flatten out.
