Mob Moll, 1959: They start them young! While most people consider the mob to be made up of a bunch of men, that acutally isn't the case. Here, 15-year-old moll Carmen Martinez doesn't go down without a fight as she is hauled off by police to Felony Court for the murder of 17-year-old Raul Banuchi. It was taken in 1959, and like the best archival images it needs almost no explanation — the frame tells its own story.
The 1950s brought a wave of postwar prosperity, especially in North America. Suburbs, television sets, big chrome-trimmed cars, and rock and roll defined the decade, and a booming picture-magazine industry sent photographers to document all of it.
Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
