Dead of Night gathers photographs that Robert H. Boltz made between the 1960s and the 1980s, when documenting automobile accidents at night was among his duties as county coroner. The book presents thirty-two of those images as duotone plates. Wrecked cars, stripped to their frames, hold the center of almost every picture. What is missing matters as much as what is shown: Boltz generally recorded the damage, not the people, and the resulting emptiness gives the photographs their weight.

The book originates in a private memory. Diane Keaton has written that her interest began with a crash outside her grandmother’s house in which two people died; she later acquired Boltz’s photographic archive and edited this selection with the Los Angeles photographer Nick Reid. Twin Palms Publishers issued the book in October 2021 as a clothbound hardcover, 11.25 by 9 inches, 72 pages, with a dust jacket.

Keaton’s text locates the work in relation to 1930s black-and-white crime films and to the chiaroscuro lighting of horror and suspense cinema. The comparison is useful without being merely atmospheric. Boltz worked at night, and the light falls on metal and broken glass while the surrounding street stays indistinct; shadows supply the information the beam withholds. In a photograph made as a record rather than as an artwork, that division between the illuminated subject and the dark field around it acquires a second life.

Read as a book, the photographs acquire a context beyond their original evidentiary purpose. The selection brings practical records into conversation with Keaton’s memory and her response to cinema. A viewer can attend to the stark light and damaged vehicles while remembering why the pictures were made. That coexistence of documentation and interpretation gives the volume its particular subject: the ways an archive can be encountered again, without erasing the circumstances behind it.