Hardcover | Tritone printing
9.10 in. x 12.25 in. | 23.114 cm. x 31.115 cm.
Original black and white photography, 108 pages
Foreword by Foster Hirsch
The city suspended in the enduring aesthetic of noir.
Daniel Sackheim’s The City Unseen brings to life desolate streets and shadowed alleyways, a dance of light and darkness that reveals the dual nature of a city. In images deeply sculpted from shadow, he presents beauty intertwined with uncertainty. Sackheim’s journey through these urban spaces is a testament to the paradox of the night, where stillness and trepidation walk hand in hand. In a city that is recognizably contemporary but timeless in its sense of apprehension and disorientation, one senses the unease lurking in the corners.
An Emmy Award–winning film and television director whose career spans three decades, Sackheim’s deep engagement with cinematic storytelling profoundly influences the substance and aesthetic of his photographic work. In The City Unseen, he turns his cinematically-trained eye to navigating the labyrinth of the urban night using deeply shadowed, evocative black-and-white photography.
As Sackheim explains in his introduction, “My earliest recollection is of being most at ease observing from the margins. Long before I picked up a camera—or imagined a career as a film editor or director—I was drawn to watching others from a distance, trying to understand how to move through the world without feeling exposed.”
Film noir provided the formal language for these instincts. Works like Sudden Fear and Touch of Evil—classic “voyeur’s noir”—drew Sackheim in with their moody, shadow-drenched cinematography. Their compositions, which inhabit the gaze of an observer of private moments, echo the oblique, elevated perspectives of his youth.
This lifelong fascination with the watcher’s point of view found its ultimate canvas in Sackheim’s base of Los Angeles. The City Unseen captures the paradoxes of a city where the brightest sun casts the deepest shadows. These constant tensions—between light and dark, glamour and decay—reflect the fractured identities at the core of noir. This body of work explores a liminal realm through images that are at once rich and stark, taking the viewer on a tour of a city that is as much a real place as a state of mind.
+++
Daniel Sackheim is an Emmy Award–winning film and television director best known for his work on a number of acclaimed series, including True Detective, Game of Thrones, Jack Ryan, and The Americans. In his parallel practice as a photographer, Sackheim examines the emotional and psychological dimensions of urban life, revealing moments of quiet tension, isolation, and ambiguity within the city’s shifting light.
Foster Hirsch is the author of The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir; Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir; Hollywood; and The Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, The Thrill of Cinerama, and The Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher—Television.
