WEEGEE (ARTHUR FELLIG) VINTAGE SILVER GELATIN PHOTO CONEY ISLAND FIRE SIGNED For Sale

This vintage silver gelatin 7 1/8 X 9 INCH photo captures the iconic Coney Island Fire in stunning black and white. Produced in 1940 by Arthur Fellig AND signed lower right in ink by Weegee, this gelatin-silver print is a true collector's item for fans of photography and collectibles. The photo is signed by the artist, adding to its value and authenticity. Perfect for display in a frame or album, this piece is a timeless representation of a significant event in American history.
from an old newspaper about the event (also attached as images for reference only)SIXTH LARGE BLAZE
HITS CONEY ISLAND
Old Mardi Gras Movie-Cafe in
Heart of the Amusement
District Wrecked
Another Coney Island fire the
sixth large blaze there since last
September - necessitated
three
alarms yesterday morning and de-
stroyed the old Mardi Gras movie-
restaurant at 1,243 Surf Avenue, in
the heart of the amusement sector.
A fireman and a civilian were in-
jured and Sea Gate-Sheepshead Bay
trolley service, which runs along
Surf Avenue, was disrupted. The
two-story theatre adjoins the con-
cession-studded terminal of the
B. M. T. at Surf and Stillwell Ave-
nues, but except for the rerouting
of passengers from the main en-
trance, subway traffic was in no
way affected.
The first alarm went in at 7:10
A. M., with others at 7:18 and 7:30.
Firemen under Deputy Chief George
McAleer realized the box-like struc-
ture was doomed and concentrated
on keeping the flames from spread-
ing in an area which has had more
than its share of fire trouble in the
past. Inspector Camille C. Pierne
was in charge of the police keeping
back a crowd of several thousand.
A roaring, v
gwind-driven blaze that
had eaten through the flat roof of
the resort was under control with-
in an hour but firemen remained on
duty
throughout the day
while
sight-seers peered at the blackened
wreckage of a landmark that went
back at least thirty-five years. The
damage was set by the police at
$50,000, with no cause officially de-
termined.
George Asemacopoulos was listed
as owner of the little movie house,
where the show was free because
patrons all sat
at metal-topped
tables and had hot dogs and beer.
The injured were Fireman Ed-
ward Larsen of Engine Company
243, whose left wrist was sprained,
and Richard Kretzer,
44,
of left ankle
was
caught in a door as he helped in
the early stages of fighting the
blaze. Both went home after treat-
ment by an
interne from Coney
Island born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899, in the town of Lemburg (now in Ukraine), first worked as a photographer at age fourteen, three years after his family immigrated to the United States, where his first name was changed to the more American-sounding Arthur. Self-taught, he held many other photography-related jobs before gaining regular employment at a photography studio in lower Manhattan in 1918. This job led him to work at a variety of newspapers until, in 1935, he became a freelance news photographer. He centered his practice around police headquarters and in 1938 obtained permission to install a police radio in his car. This allowed him to take the first and most sensational photographs of news events and offer them for sale to publications such as the Herald-Tribune, Daily News, Post, the Sun, and PM Weekly, among others. During the 1940s, Weegee's photographs appeared outside the mainstream press and met success there as well. New York's Photo League held an exhibition of his work in 1941, and the Museum of Modern Art began collecting his work and exhibited it in 1943. Weegee published his photographs in several books, including Naked City (1945), Weegee's People (1946), and Naked Hollywood (1953). After moving to Hollywood in 1947, he devoted most of his energy to making 16-millimeter films and photographs for his "Distortions" series, a project that resulted in experimental portraits of celebrities and political figures. He returned to New York in 1952 and lectured and wrote about photography until his death on December 26, 1968.Weegee's photographic oeuvre is unusual in that it was successful in the popular media and respected by the fine art community during his lifetime. His ability to navigate between these two realms–crime scene photography and high art–comes from the strong emotional connection forged between the viewer and the characters in his photographs, as well as from Weegee's skill at choosing the most telling and significant moments of the events he photographed. Among eminent 20th-century photographers, Weegee stands out for his ability to capture raw and powerful images that resonated with both the public and critics.ICP's retrospective exhibition of his work in 1998 attested to Weegee's continued popularity; his work is frequently recollected or represented in contemporary television, film, and other forms of popular entertainment.Arthur (Usher) Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), known by his pseudonym Weegee, was a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography in New York City.[1]Weegee worked in Manhattan's Lower East Side as a press photographer during the 1930s and 1940s and developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity.[2] Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick.Weegee was born Ascher (later modified to Usher) Fellig in Złoczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), near Lemberg in Austrian Galicia. His given name was changed to Arthur after he immigrated with his family to New York in 1909. The father of the family, Bernard Fellig, emigrated in 1908, followed in 1909 by his wife and their four children, including "Usher Felik", as his name was spelled on the steerage passenger list of the steamship, Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. In Brooklyn, where they settled, he took numerous odd jobs, including working as a street photographer of children on his pony[3] and as an assistant to a commercial photographer. In 1924 he was hired as a darkroom technician by Acme Newspictures (later United Press International Photos). He left Acme in 1935 to become a freelance photographer. Describing his beginnings, Weegee stated: In my particular case I didn't wait 'til somebody gave me a job or something, I went and created a job for myself—freelance photographer. And what I did, anybody else can do. What I did simply was this: I went down to Manhattan Police Headquarters and for two years I worked without a police card or any kind of credentials. When a story came over a police teletype, I would go to it. The idea was I sold the pictures to the newspapers. And naturally, I picked a story that meant something.[4]He worked at night and competed with the police to be first at the scene of a crime, selling his photographs to tabloids and photographic agencies.[5] His photographs, centered around Manhattan police headquarters, were soon published by the Daily News and other tabloids, as well as more upscale publication such as Life magazine.[6]In 1957, after developing diabetes, he moved in with Wilma Wilcox, a Quaker social worker whom he had known since the 1940s, and who cared for him and then cared for his work.[7] He traveled extensively in Europe until 1964, working for the London Daily Mirror and on a variety of photography, film, lecture, and book projects.[8] On December 26, 1968, Weegee died in New York at the age of 69.[9]
PseudonymThe origin of Fellig's pseudonym is uncertain. One of his earliest jobs was in the photo lab of The New York Times, where (in a reference to the tool used to wipe down prints) he was nicknamed "squeegee boy". Later, during his employment with Acme Newspictures, his skill and ingenuity in developing prints on the run (e.g., in a subway car) earned him the name "Mr. Squeegee".[10] He may subsequently have been dubbed "Weegee"—a phonetic rendering of Ouija—because his instant and seemingly prescient arrivals at scenes of crimes or other emergencies seemed as magical as a Ouija board.[10][2]
Photographic career
Photographic technique
Main article: ƒ/8 and be thereMost of his notable photographs were taken with very basic press photographer equipment and methods of the era, a 4×5 Speed Graphic camera preset at f/16 at 1/200 of a second, with flashbulbs and a set focus distance of ten feet.[11] He was a self-taught photographer with no formal training.[12] He is often said—incorrectly—to have developed his photographs in a makeshift darkroom in the trunk of his car.[13] While Fellig would shoot a variety of subjects and individuals, he also had a sense of what sold best: Names make news. There's a fight between a drunken couple on Third Avenue or Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen, nobody cares. It's just a barroom brawl. But if society has a fight in a Cadillac on Park Avenue and their names are in the Social Register, this makes news and the papers are interested in that.[14]Weegee is spuriously credited for answering "f/8 and be there" when asked about his photographic technique.[15] Whether or not he actually said it, the saying has become so widespread in photographic circles as to have become a cliché.[16][17] Yet other sources, in mentioning his standard technique (f/16, Pressbulb25, focus at 10'), illustrate the probable fiction behind the mention of 'f/8'. A book written about Weegee, Weegee's Secrets published in 1953, says: For the record, Weegee shot the majority of his photos from 6-feet at f/22 and 10-feet at f16. These smaller f/stops provided excellent depth of field. When hunting for photos, Weegee would stalk the streets with his camera set to 10-feet and f/16. This distance was useful for shooting people full-length. He also carried a flashlight for adjusting his camera settings in the dark.Some of Weegee's photos, like the juxtaposition of society grandes dames in ermines and tiaras and a glowering street woman at the Metropolitan Opera (The Critic, 1943), were later revealed to have been staged.[18][19]
Late 1930s to mid-1940s
Weegee's rubber stamp for signing his picturesIn 1938, Fellig became the only New York freelance newspaper photographer with a permit to have a portable police-band shortwave radio. Weegee worked mostly at night; he listened closely to broadcasts and often beat authorities to the scene.[20]Five of his photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1943. These works were included in its exhibition Action Photography.[21] He was later included in "50 Photographs by 50 Photographers", another MoMA show organized by photographer Edward Steichen,[21] and he lectured at the New School for Social Research. Advertising and editorial assignments for magazines followed, including Life and beginning in 1945, Vogue.Naked City (1945) was his first book of photographs. Film producer Mark Hellinger bought the rights to the title from Weegee.[21] In 1948, Weegee's aesthetic formed the foundation for Hellinger's film The Naked City. It was based on a gritty 1948 story written by Malvin Wald about the investigation into a model's murder in New York. Wald was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, co-written with screenwriter Albert Maltz, who would later be blacklisted in the McCarthy era.[22] Later the title was used again for a naturalistic television police drama series, and in the 1980s, it was adopted by a band, Naked City, led by the New York experimental musician John Zorn.[citation needed]According to the commentary by director Robert Wise, Weegee appeared in the 1949 film The Set-Up, ringing the bell at the boxing match.[citation needed]
1950s and 1960sWeegee experimented with 16mm filmmaking himself beginning in 1941 and worked in the Hollywood industry from 1946 to the early 1960s, as an actor and a consultant. He was an uncredited special effects consultant[23] and credited stills photographer for Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. His accent was one of the influences for the accent of the title character in the film, played by Peter Sellers.[23]In the 1950s and 1960s, Weegee experimented with panoramic photographs, photo distortions and photography through prisms. Using a plastic lens, he made a famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe in which her face is grotesquely distorted yet still recognizable.[24] For the 1950 movie The Yellow Cab Man, Weegee contributed a sequence in which automobile traffic is wildly distorted. He is credited for this as "Luigi" in the film's opening titles. He also traveled widely in Europe in the 1960s, where he photographed nude subjects. In London he befriended pornographer Harrison Marks and the model Pamela Green, whom he photographed.[citation needed]In 1962,[25] Weegee starred as himself in a "Nudie Cutie" exploitation film, intended to be a pseudo-documentary of his life. Called The 'Imp'probable Mr. Wee Gee, it saw Fellig apparently falling in love with a shop-window dummy that he follows to Paris, all the while pursuing or photographing various women.[26]
LegacyWeegee can be seen as the American counterpart to Brassaï, who photographed Paris street scenes at night. Weegee's themes of nudists, circus performers, freaks and street people were later taken up and developed by Diane Arbus in the early 1960s.[5]In 1980, Weegee's companion Wilma Wilcox, along with Sidney Kaplan, Aaron Rose and Larry Silver, formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints made from Weegee's original negatives.[27] As a bequest, Wilma Wilcox donated the entire Weegee archive – 16,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives[7] – to the International Center of Photography in New York. This 1993 gift and transfer of copyright became the source for several exhibitions and books including Weegee's World, edited by Miles Barth (1997), and Unknown Weegee, edited by Cynthia Young (2006). The first and largest exhibition was the 329-image Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama, mounted in 1997. It was followed in 2002 by Weegee's Trick Photography, a show of distorted or otherwise caricatured images, and four years later by Unknown Weegee, a survey that emphasized his less violent, post-tabloid photographs.[7]In 2009, the Kunsthalle Vienna held an exhibition called Elevator to the Gallows. The exhibition combined modern installations by Banks Violette with Weegee's nocturnal photography.[28]In 2012 ICP opened another Weegee exhibition titled, Murder Is My Business. Also in 2012, an exhibition called Weegee: The Naked City,[29] opened at Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Weegee's autobiography, originally published in 1961 as Weegee by Weegee and long out of print, was retitled as Weegee: The Autobiography and republished in 2013.[30]From April 2013 through July 2014, the Flatz Museum in Dornbirn, Austria presented Weegee. How to photograph a corpse, based on relevant photographs from Weegee's portfolio, including many vintage prints. Original newspapers and magazines, dating back to the time where the photos were taken, accompanied the photographs.[31]
In popular culture Peter Sellers mimicked Weegee’s voice and gave it a German accent when playing the title role in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Academy Award nominated comedy Dr. Strangelove, where Weegee was on the set taking pictures during the production of the film.
According to director Dario Argento, the photographer played by Harvey Keitel in his segment of Two Evil Eyes was inspired by Weegee.
The 1992 film The Public Eye is said to be loosely based on Weegee[32]
The 1999 The X-Files episode "Tithonus" concerns an "Alfred Fellig", investigated for having photographed crime scenes prior to the arrival of emergency services.
A crop of his 1940 photo Crowd at Coney Island was used as the cover for the 1990 George Michael album Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.
The John Zorn-led band Naked City took their name and first album cover from Weegee.
Weegee is the photographer for the Minutemen in the movie Watchmen.
The 2014 film Nightcrawler was also inspired by Weegee.[33]
Maguire's crime scene photography in the 2002 film Road to Perdition is based on Weegee.Public collections Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL[34]
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jewish Museum
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam[35]
International Center of Photography[36]See also The Public Eye – Filmmaker Howard Franklin was unable to secure the rights to Fellig's life story, so he created a fictionalized version.[37]
Ƒ/8 and be thereBorn Usher Fellig on June 12 in Lemberg (also know as Lvov), Austria (now Ukraine), to Rachel and Bernard Fellig. Weegee was the second of seven children. The first four, Elias (1897), Usher, Rachel, and Phillip, were born in Lemberg. The youngest three siblings, Molly, Jack, and Yetta, were born in the United States.
Photographer unknown. Weegee's parents - Rachel and Bernard Fellig, c. 1920s
1906 Bernard Fellig leaves Europe for the United States.
1910 Rest of family arrives in New York and settles on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Usher’s name is changed to Arthur upon arrival. Bernard Fellig had studied to become a rabbi in Austria. However, in America, he earned a living as a pushcart vender, a common source of income for new immigrants on the Lower East Side. He and his wife also worked as janitors in a tenement building in exchange for rent. Fellig always maintained a strong commitment to Judaism, maintaining the Sabbath even at the peril of the family’s income. Later on in his life, Bernard Fellig completed his religious studies and became a rabbi.
1913 Weegee (he will continue to be known as Arthur for the next two decades) makes the decision to leave school to help support his family. His first job was as a tintype photographer. After several months, Weegee started assisting a commercial photographer. After several years of grueling, tedious work, he quit to begin working as a street portrait photographer. Equipped with a pony, Weegee photographed Lower East Side children on weekends, making contact proofs during the week. This job was short-lived, however, because of the expense of caring for the pony.
1917 At the demise of his pony photography career, Weegee decided to move out of his family home. He was eighteen and seeking freedom from his family’s strict ways. For a time Weegee was homeless, and found shelter in missions and public parks, and Pennsylvania Railroad station. For several years, he held a variety of jobs including busboy, dishwasher, day laborer, candy mixer (including a stint as a "hole puncher" at the Life Saver factory), and biscuit maker. All the while, he regularly looked for work with a photography studio.
1918 Weegee finds a job at Ducket & Adler photography studio on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan, where he does variety of studio and darkroom tasks.
1921 Applies for and receives a job as helper in the darkrooms of The New York Times, and their photo syndicate Wide World Photos. This job was to last for two years.
c. 1924 to 1927 Joins Acme Newspictures (later absorbed by United Press International) as darkroom technician and printer. While at Acme, fills in as news photographer.
1934 Rents a one-room apartment at 5 Center Market Place, where he lives until 1947.
1935 Leaves Acme to begin a freelance career. Activities centered around Manhattan police headquarters. Photographs published by Herald Tribune, World-Telegram, Daily News, Post, Journal-American, Sun, and others. (This begins the period of Weegee’s most significant work, produced in New York between 1935 and 1947.)
Photographer unknown. Weegee and fellow press photograhers in front of Police Headquarters, c.1934 1938 Obtains permission to install police radio in car. Around this time adopts the name Weegee.
Photographer unknown. Weegee at his typewriter in the trunk of his 1938 'Chevy,' c.1943

1940 Given special position by the progressive evening newspaper PM, to create photo-stories of his choice, or accept assignments from the newspaper’s editors.
1941 "Weegee: Murder is My Business," exhibition opens at the Photo League, New York. Weegee begins to experiment with handheld 16 mm movie camera.
1943 Five photographs acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and included in their exhibition, "Action Photography."
1945 Publication of Naked City (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce; Essential Books), the first book of Weegee’s photographs, and accompanying national publicity tour. Begins photographing for Vogue.
1946 Publication of Weegee's People (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce; Essential Books). Lectures at The New School for Social Research, New York. Weegee sells the rights to the title of his book, Naked City, to Mark Hellinger for a Hollywood feature film.
1947 Marries Margaret Atwood, and late in the year leaves New York for Hollywood to serve as consultant on film version of Naked City. During the next several years, worked as a technical consultant on films and played minor film roles. He also began to experiment with a variety of lenses and other devices to begin creating his "distortion" series.
1948 Release of The Naked City by Universal Pictures, and Weegee appears for the first time as an extra in the film, "Every Girl Should Be Married." His own (and first) film, Weegee's New York (20 minutes, black and white, 16mm) is completed. He is represented in the "50 Photographs by 50 Photographers" exhibition organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Photographer unknown. Weegee pointing at the poster for the film Naked City, 1948
1949 Weegee and Margaret Atwood are separated, and divorce a year later.
c. 1950 Produces film Cocktail Party (5 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm).
1952 Returns to New York after several years of living and working in Hollywood. Begins a series of distorted portraits of celebrities and political figures, which he calls caricatures.
1953 Publication of Naked Hollywood by Weegee and Mel Harris (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy), the first book in which his distortions are published.
1955 Distorted portraits are published in July issue of Vogue.
1957 Diagnosed with diabetes, Weegee moves to West 47th Street, the home of Wilma Wilcox, who remains his companion until his death.
1958 Consultant for Stanley Kubrick's film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Traveled extensively in Europe until 1968, working for the Daily Mirror and on a variety of photography, film, lecture, and book projects.
1959 Lecture tour in USSR in conjunction with several exhibitions held here. Publication of Weegee's Creative Camera (Garden City, New York: Hanover House).
1960 Exhibition: "Weegee: Caricatures of the Great," at Photokina, Cologne, West Germany.
1961 Publication of autobiography, Weegee by Weegee (New York: Ziff-Davis).
Photographer unknown. Portrait of Weegee (Arthur Fellig), c.1956 Inscribed on image: "To all my Subjects, Weegee."
1962 Exhibition at Photokina, Cologne, West Germany.
1964 Publication of Weegee's Creative Photography (London: Ward, Lock, and Co.).
c. 1965 Makes film The Idiot Box (5 minutes, black and white, sound 16mm).
1968 Weegee dies in New York on December 26, at the age of 69This is the most wonderful experience for any man or woman to go through. It’s like a modern Aladdin’s lamp—you rub it, in this case it’s a camera. You push a button and it gives you the things you want. News photography teaches to think fast, to be sure of yourself, self-confidence. When you go out on a story, you don’t go back for another sitting. You’ve got to get it. I have found covering stories as they happen . . . in my particular case I didn’t wait ‘til somebody gave me a job or something, I went and created a job for myself—freelance photographer. And what I did, anybody else can do. What I did simply was this: I went down to Manhattan Police Headquarters and for two years I worked without a police card or any kind of credentials. When a story came over a police teletype, I would go to it. The idea was I sold the pictures to the newspapers. And naturally, I picked a story that meant something. In other words, names make news. There’s a fight between a drunken couple on Third Avenue or Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, nobody cares. It’s just a barroom brawl. But if society has a fight in a Cadillac on Park Avenue and their names are in the Social Register, this makes news and the papers are interested in that. I covered all kinds of stories from Murder Incorporated to the opening of the opera to a Cinderella Ball at the Waldorf. In other words, you take everything in its stride. The same camera that photographs a murder scene can photograph a beautiful society affair in a big hotel.Now the easiest kind of a job to cover was a murder because the stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn’t get up and walk away or get temperamental. He would be good for at least two hours. At fires you had to work very fast.Weegee_02.jpg
Courtesy Ledel Gallery.One of the best pictures I ever made, just to give you an aside: I got up nine o’clock one night and I says to myself, “I’m going to take a nice little ride and work up an appetite.” I arrived right in the heart of Little Italy, 10 Prince Street. Here’s a guy had been bumped off in the doorway of a little candy store. This was a nice, balmy hot summer’s night. The detectives are all over, but all the five stories of the tenement, people are on the fire escape. They’re looking; they’re having a good time. Some of the kids are even reading the funny papers and the comics. There was another photographer there and he made what we call a ten foot shot. He made a shot of just the guy laying in the doorway. That was it. But to me, this was drama. This was like a backdrop. I stepped all the way back, about a hundred feet. I used flash powder, and I got this whole scene—the people on the fire escapes, the body, everything. Of course the title for it was Balcony Seats at a Murder. That picture won me a gold diamond with a real genuine diamond. So that was it.I try to humanize the news story. Of course I ran into snags with the dopey editors. If it was a fire, they’d say, “Where’s the burning building?” I says, “Look, they all look alike.” I says, “Look, here’s the people affected by the burning building.” Well, some understood it and some didn’t.In one case I went to a tenement house fire. Here’s the mother and daughter looking up hopelessly. Another daughter and baby are burning to death. Now, at a fire, what happens? Those that are lucky to get out of the burning tenements gather in the street, of course. Then the firemen start counting noses. They want to see how many people are there. And I noticed also at this particular fire, the aide to the chief came out and he says, “Boss, this is a roast,” meaning somebody, one or more persons, had burned to death. That’s what the fireman called “a roast.” And I saw this woman and her daughter looking up hopelessly. I took that picture. To me that symbolized the lousy tenements and everything else that went with them.Weegee_03.jpg
From PM Magazine, Tuesday, August 5th, 1941, New York.I will walk many times with friends down the street and they’ll say, “Hey Weegee, here’s a drunk or two drunks laying in the gutter.” I take one quick look at them and say, “They lack character.” So even a drunk must be a masterpiece. I will drive around all night or all year looking for a good drunk picture. One of the most beautiful ones I got after riding around two years, then I made my drunk picture, was a guy on Amsterdam Avenue. One Sunday morning about five o’clock, he was sleeping underneath a canopy of a funeral undertaking parlor. Now that to me was a picture. Of course the obvious title would be Dead Drunk.In other words, I am a perfectionist. When I take a picture, if it’s a murder or if it’s a drunk, it’s got to be good. When a person gets in trouble and they get arrested, the first thing they do is cover up their faces. Editors don’t like it. They say, “Don’t give me any excuses. Give me a picture so our readers can see what the person looks like.”For example, the New York cops arrested a woman who was wanted for a $25,000 jewel robbery in Washington, DC. The woman, being a dope, was naturally captured. She was in a cell downstairs in the basement of Manhattan Police Headquarters. I went down, she started to cover up. I says, “Look lady, save your energy. I’m not going to take your picture. All I want to do is talk to you.” She says, “I know what you want. You want to take my picture. Why should I let you? So my friends, relatives, and mother can see it on the front pages of the newspapers?” I said, “Now wait a minute lady, don’t be so hasty. You have your choice. Do you want your picture to appear in the papers, a rogues’ gallery picture with your number underneath it? Or would you let me make a nice, home portrait study of you using nice, soft lighting like Rembrandt would have done?” Talking and arguing with her, I convinced her that that was the only logical thing for her to do, to pose for a picture. Now that was a good catch you might say for me, besides the New York cops.Anyway, this showed that by arguing with people, you can get them to uncover. People are reasonable. Even jewel thieves.Weegee_04.jpg
From PM Magazine, July 20th, 1941, New York.And why I think the definition of a news shot would be this, a news picture rather, I once photographed and did a story on Steiglitz, truly a great photographer. And we started talking about things and he said, “Something happens, it’s a thousandth part of a fleeting second. It’s up to the photographer to capture that on film because like a dying day, the thing will never come back again.”Usher Fellig became Arthur Fellig at the age of 10, when he entered the United States through Ellis Island. He had arrived in New York from Zloczow, Poland (now part of Ukraine) in 1910 with his family; they were fleeing another wave of violent pogroms that had begun sweeping across the Pale of Settlement in 1903.1 But it wasn’t until the 1930s that Fellig took on the name Weegee. He was a photographer so attuned to the goings on of New York’s city streets that he seemed to intuit events before their unfolding—at times he seemed possessed, like a Ouija board.Weegee embraced this origin story, attributing “Weegee” to a simplification of “Ouija” in signing and answering fan mail, often expanding his title to “Weegee the Famous.” But in fact, his name is rooted in his beginnings in the world of press photography. Weegee worked as a “squeegee boy” in the darkrooms of the New York Times, removing excess water from prints so they could be placed on a chrome-plated sheet, which was then inserted into heated dryers.2 As his technical prowess with the process developed, the mocking “squeegee boy” assignation morphed into a praising nickname, “Mr. Squeegee,” which ultimately wore down into “Weegee.”3Going on to work for ACME Newspictures as a printer and then a photographer, by 1935 Weegee had built a career as a freelance press photographer, taking pictures of the tenement fires, car accidents, burglaries, parades, and brawls that unfolded across the city. Soon he became an insistent, itinerant presence in New York—his seeming clairvoyance was aided by a police radio scanner installed in the front of his 1938 Chevrolet, which also had a darkroom installed in the trunk. An ardent believer in the immediacy of the image, Weegee said, “News photography teaches you to think fast, to be sure of yourself, self-confidence. When you go out on a story, you don’t go back for another sitting. You gotta get it.”4 Using a 4 × 5 Speed Graphic camera in gleaming, sturdy aluminum and steel, Weegee often shot from unconventional angles and varied vantage points. The resulting images were rangy photographic compositions—as unusual, brash, and vulnerable as their subjects. Abandoning subtlety in favor of drama, Weegee’s high-contrast images are rife with symmetry, pattern, and bold lines, offering opportunities to detect formal strategies in unexpected contexts, from the back of a police van to a street facing façades of apartment buildings. He focused on the grit of the city, and while the harsh light in his images often sensationalized emotions, these candid shots incisively revealed the juxtapositions of grandeur and destitution built into the social structures of New York.Epitomized by his 1945 photobook Naked City, Weegee’s voracious visual appetite encompassed the spectacle of life and the surprise of sudden death in New York, his images searingly truthful and fearless. He said, “When I really see the picture is when I’ve developed the film. Then I really see what I’ve done. I really seem to be in a trance when I am taking the picture because there is so much drama taking place or will take place. I mean, you just can’t hide it—go around wearing rose-colored glasses. In other words we have beauty and we have ugliness. Everybody likes beauty, but there’s ugliness too.”5 A photographer synonymous with 20th-century New York and its myriad denizens, Weegee made pictures that attest to the pulsing rhythms of the city and its status as a place continually in transformation, brimming with possibilities.As legend tells it, Arthur Fellig earned the nickname Weegee during his early career as a freelance press photographer in New York City. His apparent sixth sense for crime often led him to a scene well ahead of the police. Observers likened this sense, actually derived from tuning his radio to the police frequency, to the Ouija board, the popular fortune-telling game. Spelling it phonetically, Fellig took Weegee as his professional name.With his subjects ranging from wild-eyed adolescent onlookers at a late night gangland slaying to glassy-eyed starlets at Hollywood movie premieres, Weegee could be considered one of the first ambulance chasers. He was as flamboyant as some of his subjects, creating his own mythology, reveling in his own notoriety as well as that of his subjects, and even stamping the backs of his pictures with "Credit Photo by Weegee the Famous."Weegee also worked in Hollywood as a filmmaker, performer, and technical consultant. His 1945 book Naked City was the inspiration for the 1947 film The Naked City. The Public Eye (1992), starring Joe Pesci, was based on the man himself.Weegee (born June 12, 1899, Złoczew, Austria-Hungary [now in Poland]—died Dec. 26, 1968, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was a photojournalist noted for his gritty yet compassionate images of the aftermath of New York street crimes and disasters.Weegee’s father, Bernard Fellig, immigrated to the United States in 1906 and was followed four years later by his wife and four children, including Usher, the second-born. At Ellis Island, Usher became Arthur. The boy dropped out of school in his early teens to help support the family. In 1923 he took a job in the darkroom of Acme Newspictures, where he was able occasionally to photograph at night. In addition to his work for Acme, he held a series of low-paying jobs until 1935, when he became a freelance photographer for a number of New York newspapers. Legend has it that his uncanny ability to appear with his camera at crime scenes as the police arrived—or sometimes even before—led to the moniker “Weegee,” a phonetic spelling of the first word in Ouija board, a device used in occultism to receive messages from the spirit world.For much of his career, Weegee was, in his own words, “spellbound by the mystery of murder.” His images have the air of a still from a film noir, photographed as they were usually at night and often with infrared film and flash. He paid special attention to the expressions and gestures of his subjects, who for the most part came from the lower strata of New York society. His feelings about privileged New Yorkers were typified in a photograph entitled The Critic, in which an ill-clothed onlooker hisses at two bejeweled women attending the opera. In 1945 Naked City, the first of Weegee’s five books, was published; the title and film rights were later sold to a Hollywood producer.From 1947 to 1952 Weegee lived in Hollywood, acting as technical advisor, playing bit parts in a few films, and photographing material that was published in 1953 as Naked Hollywood. By the time he returned to New York City, his most enduring work had been done. Upon his return he embarked on a series of photo distortions, but these caricatures of famous persons were not well-received. In 1961 his autobiography, Weegee by Weegee, was published. His uncanny ability to capture a dramatic segment of New York street life remains his most significant contribution to photography.
This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
journalism
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History
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Present-day journalismReferences & Edit History
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David Scott: Funeral held for 'the journalist's journalist'journalism, the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such print and electronic media as newspapers, magazines, books, blogs, webcasts, podcasts, social networking and social media sites, and e-mail as well as through radio, motion pictures, and television. The word journalism was originally applied to the reportage of current events in printed form, specifically newspapers, but with the advent of radio, television, and the Internet in the 20th century the use of the term broadened to include all printed and electronic communication dealing with current affairs.
HistoryThe earliest known journalistic product was a news sheet circulated in ancient Rome: the Acta Diurna, said to date from before 59 bce. The Acta Diurna recorded important daily events such as public speeches. It was published daily and hung in prominent places. In China during the Tang dynasty, a court circular called a bao, or “report,” was issued to government officials. This gazette appeared in various forms and under various names more or less continually to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The first regularly published newspapers appeared in German cities and in Antwerp about 1609. The first English newspaper, the Weekly Newes, was published in 1622. One of the first daily newspapers, The Daily Courant, appeared in 1702.
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history of publishing: Newspaper publishingAt first hindered by government-imposed censorship, taxes, and other restrictions, newspapers in the 18th century came to enjoy the reportorial freedom and indispensable function that they have retained to the present day. The growing demand for newspapers owing to the spread of literacy and the introduction of steam- and then electric-driven presses caused the daily circulation of newspapers to rise from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands and eventually to the millions.Magazines, which had started in the 17th century as learned journals, began to feature opinion-forming articles on current affairs, such as those in the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12). Appearing in the 1830s were cheap mass-circulation magazines aimed at a wider and less well-educated public, as well as illustrated and women’s magazines. The cost of large-scale news gathering led to the formation of news agencies, organizations that sold their international journalistic reporting to many different individual newspapers and magazines. The invention of the telegraph and then radio and television brought about a great increase in the speed and timeliness of journalistic activity and, at the same time, provided massive new outlets and audiences for their electronically distributed products. In the late 20th century, satellites and later the Internet were used for the long-distance transmission of journalistic information.
The professionJournalism in the 20th century was marked by a growing sense of professionalism. There were four important factors in this trend: (1) the increasing organization of working journalists, (2) specialized education for journalism, (3) a growing literature dealing with the history, problems, and techniques of mass communication, and (4) an increasing sense of social responsibility on the part of journalists.An organization of journalists began as early as 1883, with the foundation of England’s chartered Institute of Journalists. Like the American Newspaper Guild, organized in 1933, and the Fédération Nationale de la Presse Française, the institute functioned as both a trade union and a professional organization.
Are you a student? Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.Before the latter part of the 19th century, most journalists learned their craft as apprentices, beginning as copyboys or cub reporters. The first university course in journalism was given at the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1879–84. In 1912 Columbia University in New York City established the first graduate program in journalism, endowed by a grant from the New York City editor and publisher Joseph Pulitzer. It was recognized that the growing complexity of news reporting and newspaper operation required a great deal of specialized training. Editors also found that in-depth reporting of special types of news, such as political affairs, business, economics, and science, often demanded reporters with education in these areas. The advent of motion pictures, radio, and television as news media called for an ever-increasing battery of new skills and techniques in gathering and presenting the news. By the 1950s, courses in journalism or communications were commonly offered in colleges.The literature of the subject—which in 1900 was limited to two textbooks, a few collections of lectures and essays, and a small number of histories and biographies—became copious and varied by the late 20th century. It ranged from histories of journalism to texts for reporters and photographers and books of conviction and debate by journalists on journalistic capabilities, methods, and ethics.Concern for social responsibility in journalism was largely a product of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The earliest newspapers and journals were generally violently partisan in politics and considered that the fulfillment of their social responsibility lay in proselytizing their own party’s position and denouncing that of the opposition. As the reading public grew, however, the newspapers grew in size and wealth and became increasingly independent. Newspapers began to mount their own popular and sensational “crusades” in order to increase their circulation. The culmination of this trend was the competition between two New York City papers, the World and the Journal, in the 1890s (see yellow journalism).The sense of social responsibility made notable growth as a result of specialized education and widespread discussion of press responsibilities in books and periodicals and at the meetings of the associations. Such reports as that of the Royal Commission on the Press (1949) in Great Britain and the less extensive A Free and Responsible Press (1947) by an unofficial Commission on the Freedom of the Press in the United States did much to stimulate self-examination on the part of practicing journalists.By the late 20th century, studies showed that journalists as a group were generally idealistic about their role in bringing the facts to the public in an impartial manner. Various societies of journalists issued statements of ethics, of which that of the American Society of Newspaper Editors is perhaps best known.
Present-day journalismAlthough the core of journalism has always been the news, the latter word has acquired so many secondary meanings that the term “hard news” gained currency to distinguish items of definite news value from others of marginal significance. This was largely a consequence of the advent of radio and television reporting, which brought news bulletins to the public with a speed that the press could not hope to match. To hold their audience, newspapers provided increasing quantities of interpretive material—articles on the background of the news, personality sketches, and columns of timely comment by writers skilled in presenting opinion in readable form. By the mid-1960s most newspapers, particularly evening and Sunday editions, were relying heavily on magazine techniques, except for their content of “hard news,” where the traditional rule of objectivity still applied. Newsmagazines in much of their reporting were blending news with editorial comment.Journalism in book form has a short but vivid history. The proliferation of paperback books during the decades after World War II gave impetus to the journalistic book, exemplified by works reporting and analyzing election campaigns, political scandals, and world affairs in general, and the “new journalism” of such authors as Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer.The 20th century saw a renewal of the strictures and limitations imposed upon the press by governments. In countries with communist governments, the press was owned by the state, and journalists and editors were government employees. Under such a system, the prime function of the press to report the news was combined with the duty to uphold and support the national ideology and the declared goals of the state. This led to a situation in which the positive achievements of communist states were stressed by the media, while their failings were underreported or ignored. This rigorous censorship pervaded journalism in communist countries.In noncommunist developing countries, the press enjoyed varying degrees of freedom, ranging from the discreet and occasional use of self-censorship on matters embarrassing to the home government to a strict and omnipresent censorship akin to that of communist countries. The press enjoyed the maximum amount of freedom in most English-speaking countries and in the countries of western Europe.Whereas traditional journalism originated during a time when information was scarce and thus highly in demand, 21st-century journalism faced an information-saturated market in which news had been, to some degree, devalued by its overabundance. Advances such as satellite and digital technology and the Internet made information more plentiful and accessible and thereby stiffened journalistic competition. To meet increasing consumer demand for up-to-the-minute and highly detailed reporting, media outlets developed alternative channels of dissemination, such as online distribution, electronic mailings, and direct interaction with the public via forums, blogs, user-generated content, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.In the second decade of the 21st century, social media platforms in particular facilitated the spread of politically oriented “fake news,” a kind of disinformation produced by for-profit Web sites posing as legitimate news organizations and designed to attract (and mislead) certain readers by exploiting entrenched partisan biases. During the campaign for the U.S. presidential election of 2016 and after his election as president in that year, Donald J. Trump regularly used the term “fake news” to disparage news reports, including by established and reputable media organizations, that contained negative information about him.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.
history of photography
Table of Contents Introduction
General considerationsInventing the medium
Photography’s early evolution, c. 1840–c. 1900
Perfecting the medium, c. 1900–c. 1945 Photography c. 1945 to the 21st centuryReferences & Edit History
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Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre: View of the Boulevard du Temple, Paris
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camerahistory of photography, method of recording the image of an object through the action of light, or related radiation, on a light-sensitive material. The word, derived from the Greek photos (“light”) and graphein (“to draw”), was first used in the 1830s.This article treats the historical and aesthetic aspects of still photography. For a discussion of the technical aspects of the medium, see photography, technology of. For a treatment of motion-picture photography, or cinematography, see motion picture, history of, and motion-picture technology.(Read Ansel Adams’ 1947 Britannica essay on “Photographic Art.”)
General considerations
Frank Sadorus: Photographing life on the Illinois plains
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Learn more about life on the plains with the photography of Frank Sadorus.
See all videos for this articleAs a means of visual communication and expression, photography has distinct aesthetic capabilities. In order to understand them, one must first understand the characteristics of the process itself. One of the most important characteristics is immediacy. Usually, but not necessarily, the image that is recorded is formed by a lens in a camera. Upon exposure to the light forming the image, the sensitive material undergoes changes in its structure, a latent (but reversed) image usually called a negative is formed, and the image becomes visible by development and permanent by fixing with sodium thiosulfate, called “hypo.” With modern materials, the processing may take place immediately or may be delayed for weeks or months.The essential elements of the image are usually established immediately at the time of exposure. This characteristic is unique to photography and sets it apart from other ways of picture making. The seemingly automatic recording of an image by photography has given the process a sense of authenticity shared by no other picture-making technique. The photograph possesses, in the popular mind, such apparent accuracy that the adage “the camera does not lie” has become an accepted, if erroneous, cliché.This understanding of photography’s supposed objectivity has dominated evaluations of its role in the arts. In the early part of its history, photography was sometimes belittled as a mechanical art because of its dependence on technology. In truth, however, photography is not the automatic process that is implied by the use of a camera. Although the camera usually limits the photographer to depicting existing objects rather than imaginary or interpretive views, the skilled photographer can introduce creativity into the mechanical reproduction process. The image can be modified by different lenses and filters. The type of sensitive material used to record the image is a further control, and the contrast between highlight and shadow can be changed by variations in development. In printing the negative, the photographer has a wide choice in the physical surface of the paper, the tonal contrast, and the image colour. The photographer also may set up a completely artificial scene to photograph.
Are you a student? Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.The most important control is, of course, the creative photographer’s vision. He or she chooses the vantage point and the exact moment of exposure. The photographer perceives the essential qualities of the subject and interprets it according to his or her judgment, taste, and involvement. An effective photograph can disseminate information about humanity and nature, record the visible world, and extend human knowledge and understanding. For all these reasons, photography has aptly been called the most important invention since the printing press.
Inventing the medium
Antecedents
principle of the camera obscura
Illustration of the principle of the camera obscura, 1671.The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a dark chamber or room with a hole (later a lens) in one wall, through first genuine adherent to a grotesque
attitude was the New York freelance press photographer Arthur Fellig,
known from about 1938 by the professional name Weegee. Born Usher
Fellig in 1899 in Austria, he was given the Americanized first name
Arthur by immigration authorities when his mother and the Fellig children arrived in 1910. His adolescence was shaped by the experiences of
a large, poor Jewish family living in the tenement districts of New York’s
Lower East Side. Among a succession of after-school jobs, Arthur worked
as a newsboy around his neighborhood, but the pursuit lasted no more
than a week since so few people in the area could read English. Arthur’s
father, whose ambitions to become a rabbi would be realized later in life,
scraped up meager earnings as a pushcart vendor and, along with his
wife, worked as a janitor in exchange for rent on the family’s tenement
rooms. To help support the family Arthur quit school at age fourteen,
and his professional life can be said to have started at that point. With
a modest set of equipment, Arthur went into street trade as a tintype
portraitist. Since its origin in the 1850s, the tintype remained in wide
use well into the next century because of its inexpensive and relatively
simple processing, which produced a unique image. The tintype is in fact
a negative that appears to be a positive print when viewed against the
dark background that has been lacquered or enameled onto a thin sheet
of iron. (Thus tintype is something of a misnomer. The image is more
properly termed a ferrotype, as it is commonly known in Great Britain.)
New York Sights
Weegee
I
CHAPTER 7
[119 ]
[76.214.138.251] Project MUSE (2024-07-15 02:37 GMT)CHAPTER 7
[ 120 ]
When sold, the tintype was typically placed in a simple folded card or
window mat, and in this form it served immigrant and working-class
customers as a durable portrait.
For slightly better pay and an opportunity to learn more of the craft,
Fellig became an assistant in a commercial studio that specialized in
photographing large manufactured goods. Though much of the work
proved menial, at the studio he did gain basics in lighting and darkroom
technique. One of the firm’s regular commissions on location involved
the documentation of factory fires for the purpose of insurance settlements. On these assignments Fellig was given the task, as he phrased it
decades later in his autobiography, “to blow the flash powder”: “I would
put a tube into my mouth and blow the flash powder onto a rag soaked in
alcohol, which would ignite the powder. It would go off like a bomb and
illuminate the scene.”1 At about age seventeen Fellig bought a secondhand 5 × 7 inch view camera. With a hired pony brought to the streets
in the Lower East Side on weekends, he attracted children for a short
ride and a portrait. Once he had made proofs from the glass plate negatives, Fellig would return to the neighborhood and take orders from parents. Negative-positive processing afforded far greater control over the
final image than with tintypes, and Fellig made tonal retouching a major
selling point: “I would finish the photographs on the contrastiest [sic]
paper I could get in order to give the kids nice white, chalky faces. My
customers, who were Italian, Polish or Jewish, like their pictures deadwhite” (Weegee, 18). In the end, however, what income he could make did
not cover expenses for the pony, and he quit the trade. Through these
early working experiences with the tintype process and its dependence
upon a dark ground for the image’s legibility, with explosive illumination
through flash powder, and with the varying effects of photographic contrast Fellig began to shape a sensibility in the black and white medium
that formed the basis for the trademark urban style of Weegee.
Arthur Fellig left home at age eighteen and for a period of months
he led a transient existence in Lower Manhattan’s districts, taking what
temporary employment he could find and sleeping in charity missions
and parks when he could not afford lodging. Eventually he was hired at a
passport studio near the Custom House downtown. His duties included
sales and camera operation and he continued in this position for nearly
three years. In time, tiring of the routine and predictability of such minor
studio work, Fellig joined the darkroom staff on a major photo syndicate.
There he found a vocation in the medium: “Here was the kind of photography that I had been looking for; no more still lifes at the commercial
studio, no more retouching wrinkles . . . from the portraits of girls, noNEW YORK SIGHTS
[121 ]
passport photos” (Weegee, 26). The autobiography, which is noticeably
casual in handling such details, dates the new employment 1923 and
identifies a position at Acme Newspictures.2
Fellig remained with Acme Newspictures for nearly the next ten years,
principally as a darkroom technician and photo printer. The syndicate,
which was later acquired by United Press International Photos, supplied
pictures for three papers in New York City and for several hundred newspapers nationwide. Fellig’s daily involvement with the preparation and
marketing of photograph images for the popular press intensely influenced his eye for subject matter and his visual rationale. Three decades
later in the overheated prose of his autobiography, the prose style itself a
sure sign of the lasting effects of this influence, the photographer recalls:
“Over the developing trays in the dark room at Acme, history passed
through my hands. Fires, explosions, railroad wrecks, ship collisions, prohibition gang wars, murders, kings, presidents, everybody famous and
everything exciting” (Weegee, 28). Patently, his attitude toward history is
stopped down to the day’s most startling events and is focused on disaster
and notoriety. On occasion in the dead of night when no staff photographer was available, an editor at Acme would send off Fellig with a camera
to cover the scene of an emergency or calamity, typically a fire. According
to statements made later in interviews and in the autobiography, from this
early point on there persisted in the photographer no less of a craving for
sensation than in the daily audience for the photo press.
Another vivid glimpse into the world of New York tabloid newspapers
of the period, one that confirms Weegee’s characterization of it, is provided in the memoirs of the Hollywood film director Sam Fuller. While
still in public school during the late 1920s Fuller began work as a copyboy
for the New York Journal, and he quickly learned that “what really sold
newspapers was violence, sex, and scandal.” He adds a wry qualification: “There were exceptions. Big trials, labor strife, filibusters, sunken
treasure, daring exploits, and political upheaval might make front-page
news.”3 At age sixteen Fuller joined the staff of the New York Evening
Graphic and, after a brief trial period, he worked there as a crime reporter
until he left for the West Coast in 1931. Earlier in his career the Graphic’s
editor-in-chief had harbored a murderer so as to take down his confession and be the first to publish it. (The incident later provided a plotline
for the hit play and movie The Front Page.) Among New York dailies the
Evening Graphic became known for its “composographs,” photograph
composites that superimposed the heads of people in the news onto the
bodies of models posed in staged situations. The counterfeit was offered
as a photographic record of the spectacular incident described in theCHAPTER 7
[ 122 ]
accompanying story. Soon after he was hired, Fuller stood in as a body
double for a composograph that portrayed a pilot desperately trying to
control his airplane moments before it crashed. This kind of illustration
of the event, which included a clear portrait of the pilot’s face, of course
in actuality was not possible with the photojournalist’s camera alone.
Fellig left Acme Newspictures in 1935 to begin freelance work as a
press photographer, and around 1938 he established his identity in the
news business as Weegee. The spelling and pronunciation is his self-fashioned version of the trademarked parlor novelty, the Ouija or “talking
board.” Introduced commercially in 1890, the Ouija device claimed psychic abilities to send and receive messages from the spirit world. While
a few practitioners still take such claims seriously, in most homes during
its greatest popularity the Ouija was regarded simply as an amusing
pastime. Weegee adopted the name with a purpose akin to a sideshow
spiel, loud in its promises of uncommon sights and experiences. The
name advertised his claim of having a sixth sense for news of calamities
that enabled him to arrive on the scene before police or fire crews and to
file his photographs first with the news agencies. In truth, Weegee spent
much time at Manhattan Police Headquarters where he could monitor
emergency calls and dispatches. When Weegee rented a room one block
away, he had it specially wired to receive such signals. By the end of the
1930s the photographer was extended official permission for the installation of a police radio in his automobile.
Once he went freelance in 1935 Weegee produced his signature photography of crime, accidents, and disaster over the next ten years, and it
received wide circulation in New York’s city press and national distribution through picture syndicates. Also on occasion Life magazine featured
Weegee’s work. He was hired as a regular contributor to the New York
evening paper PM Daily when it started publication in 1940. A quality
newspaper of liberal views, PM Daily was headed by a former chief
editor in the Time-Life organization. Given substantial latitude in his
assignments, Weegee maintained a nonexclusive contract with the paper
for five years. The photographer expanded his range of subject matter
to include benign human interest stories such as Coney Island crowds
in summer, the opening of the opera season, the circus, and the Macy’s
parade on Thanksgiving. In this period Weegee photographs were exhibited in New York galleries and museums, first in the one-man show
Murder is My Business at the Photo League in 1941 and subsequently in
two group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Action Photography in
1943 and Art in Progress in 1944. Weegee’s book Naked City, in which his
untutored version of hardboiled prose accompanies his pictures of NewNEW YORK SIGHTS
[123 ]
York, was published in June 1945, and it went through six printings by
the end of the year.4
In comparison to Weegee’s “naked city” perspective the prose and
the photographs within the Federal Writers’ Project Panorama (1938)
and Guide (1939) publications on New York contain nothing to suggest
a grotesque attitude toward the city. For all of its attention to particulars
of cultural history, demographics, ethnicity, and social geography, the
Panorama volume celebrates its subject as the contemporary cosmopolis
nonpareil, “not only the symbol of America but the daemonic symbol of
the modern, . . . the world city whose past weighed least heavily upon
its future.” Along the way, the volume acknowledges some inequities of
the recent past and the present, such as slum tenement districts and riots
in Harlem. But the character of the city’s future is to be determined by
an ongoing process that directs “the terrific flume of her energy into the
orderly dynamos of social realization.” In deploying another trope, the
Panorama imagines that the great diversity and incongruities within the
city’s populace are coordinated into the instruments and voicings of a
“New World Symphony.”5 Not one image among the book’s one hundred
photograph illustrations offers a contradiction to this tone of promise.
Published one year later, the Guide, its text divided into sections by
localities within the city’s five boroughs, is more receptive to disparities
in circumstances and experience. The description of the Times Square
district, for instance, ruminates: “Here midnight streets are more brilliant
than noon. . . . Here, too, in a permanent moralizing tableau, appear the
extremes of success and failure characteristic of Broadway’s spectacular
professions: gangsters and racketeers, panhandlers and derelicts, youthful
stage stars and aging burlesque comedians, world heavyweight champions
and once-acclaimed beggars.” Urban colorism in this scene obviously follows the example of Damon Runyon’s fiction. Although a “midway side”
to Times Square and the “freak shows” at Coney Island are mentioned, the
guide avoids depiction of the exact nature of such attractions. The guide
locates the city’s lowest depths in Harlem and the Bowery, but it does not
etch the trivial, terrible, lived details such conditions entail. The section
on the Bowery, for example, limits its social commentary to the rather
generic language contained in two sentences: “Here flophouses offer a
bug-infested bed in an unventilated pigeonhole for twenty-five cents a
night, restaurants serve ham and eggs for ten cents, and students in barber
‘colleges’ cut hair for fifteen cents. Thousands of the nation’s unemployed
drift to this section and may be seen sleeping in all-night restaurants, in
doorways, and on loading platforms, furtively begging, or waiting with
hopeless faces for some bread line or free lodging house to open.”6
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Only two photographs in the New York City Guide relate to issues of
human degradation; one presents a back alley view of a tenement on the
Lower East Side, the other abandoned buildings in a Harlem slum. The
emphasis in them falls upon environment, not upon people. The human
costs of poverty and dereliction are expressed to a degree in illustrations by graphic artists Mabel Dwight and Eli Jacobi styled in a mannered proletarian realism. While the prose entry on Times Square offers
morality tale exempla of the city’s incongruities, the guide’s photograph
of the famous intersection ignores the passing scene of life at street level.
The picture’s vantage upon Times Square is from an elevated panoramic
nighttime view that directs attention mainly upon towering, illuminated
business and advertising signs. The scene contains no suggestion of social
contrasts; it comes no closer to life on the street than the expansive, bright
theater and hotel marquees above the sidewalks.
The attention of Weegee’s camera roamed from Bowery drunks to
socialites at the Met, from three-alarm blazes to vice arrests and murder
scenes. Many familiar Weegee photographs provide nighttime glimpses
of crime, accident, and fire victims. These kinds of events warranted the
kind of momentary attention and descriptive rendering characteristic of
his visual style. Such news events, and such images as Weegee made
of them, held little claim to narrative depth or lasting historical significance. The quotidian sensationalism in many of these photographs surely
exemplifies features of mass culture that Walter Benjamin associates with
the new sensorium of urban experience and a modern temporality first
expressed fully by Baudelaire. While nothing could be farther from Weegee’s intentions or probably even his comprehension, when in the course
of the 1930s Benjamin contemplated the medium of photography such
features defined a new register of experience and time fundamental to
a materialist understanding of history. The consumer of modern media
culture—particularly in cases of the illustrated press and motion pictures—is subject to reflex processes that Benjamin characterizes as “perception in the form of shocks” and “reception in a state of distraction.”7
In Naked City Weegee features under the heading “Psychic Photography” a pedestrian accident and a street explosion, each event “photographed before and after it happened.”8 Given camera technology in the
1930s, it was rare to record photographically a purely accidental event
over its duration. The fact that such a record was made in 1937 of the
airship Hindenberg disaster is a part of the historic nature of the event.
Really what Weegee and news photographers like him offered the daily
press were documented instances of the aftermath to catastrophe. Where
Benjamin generalizes on the medium of photography and its intrinsicNEW YORK SIGHTS
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temporality, “the camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it
were,” a quality of the posthumous is literally contained within many
crime and accident photographs.9 With the denouement to such an
event having run its violent course, Weegee arrives soon after to conduct through the camera a visual postmortem to the episode. A murder
victim is documented dead on the spot where he has fallen. Casualties
in an auto wreck are shown pitched askew within a vehicle or on the
pavement. The deceased from a fire are registered as shrouded figures
laid out at the scene.
The equipment with which Weegee covered local New York stories,
many in the night hours, was the Speed Graphic camera with a highintensity flash attachment. In production since 1912, with many technical
improvements the Speed Graphic became by the 1930s a standard portable camera for professional photographers, including journalists, and
remained so well into the 1950s. By the time Weegee turned freelance
the disposable flash bulb had replaced powder for illumination and synchronization between flash and shutter was a regular camera feature.10
Weegee often relied on a common professional camera practice with the
Speed Graphic in the event of a sudden photo opportunity. With focus
preset at ten feet, exposure time at 1/200th second, and lens aperture at
f16, at the scene the photojournalist need only position his camera some
ten feet from the principal subject. The small aperture guaranteed an
adequate depth of field in focus for the area of flash illumination. Fall-off
in light intensity from the flash could leave the background and edges
of the scene vague and unfocused. Weegee worked in the conventional
press format of the 4 × 5 inch picture negative, which is relatively large
for a camera with such mobility. This negative size also provided the
photographer ample latitude in the darkroom for cropping the image,
editing its content, and manipulating densities of black and white. Key
to Weegee’s camera and darkroom methods was his purpose in making
photographs for mass reproduction and distribution. Knowing their end
use, Weegee made photographs designed to withstand the diminishing
effects on clarity and contrast that were a result of cheap printing processes used by tabloid newspapers. The more expensive hot ink process
used by PM Daily was an exception, and it provided magazine print
quality for Weegee’s photographs.
Weegee’s New York is most often evoked as a city of night. In a typical
Weegee image of urban misfortune a stark, brief radiance from the photographer’s flash attachment has penetrated the city’s impersonal darkness to yield a perspective on human fate. With such a flashlit image the
scene’s background and edges might remain pitched in night. For someCHAPTER 7
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photographs Weegee would contribute further to this effect in the darkroom while printing his negatives by burning in areas of the composition to produce deep, flat, funereal blacks. Within Weegee’s iconography,
flash illumination is as sudden and brief as it is brilliant and disturbing,
preserving for clear view what belongs originally to darkness. In this as
much as in subject matter his iconography shares qualities inherent to the
grotesque, a mode that in its original sense involves the adumbration of
some incongruous, unsettling sight.
One effect of Weegee’s use of a powerful flash and fast shutter speed
for a nighttime image is to compress the picture composition within a
plane of visual interest defined by limited light. The resultant contrasts in
tone between lights and darks can be abrupt, without much intermediary
gradation in gray. These attributes are exemplified in his photograph
Gunman Killed by Off Duty Cop at 344 Broome St., which appeared in the
February 3, 1942 issue of PM Daily (fig. 7.1). This sidewalk spectacle of
Figure 7.1. Weegee, Gunman Killed by Off Duty Cop at 344 Broome St., February 3, 1942.
International Center of Photography/Getty Images.NEW YORK SIGHTS
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violent death is shot with light. Unmistakably, the camera has been aimed
and the flash discharged in the direction pointed by the pistol barrel.
This trajectory aligns the picture and viewers with an act of homicide,
irrespective of the fact that the pistol on the pavement may well belong
to the victim and not the cop who shot him. In this alignment and as
was customary, Weegee adopted a perspective that accentuates crude
designs caused by sudden death and left for ironic notice among the
living. Another such note is registered with the victim’s slim cigar, still
poised between his lips. These effects differ somewhat from the “trivial
and terrible” details Baudelaire noted in the death scene imagined by
Daumier. The Weegee photograph displays death trivialized by cheap
ironies readymade within the public sphere, present within everyday
scenes of violence and suffering themselves. Almost as terrible as the
event itself is the trivialization.
Often the ironies and the trivialization attached to individual disaster
are overstated in Weegee photographs. An obvious instance is Joy of
Living, published in PM Daily on April 17, 1942 to report on a traffic accident that caused one fatality (fig. 7.2). Most prominently, the moviehouse
marquee provides a deadpan commentary on the incident. But no less
a part of the photograph’s grotesque reflexivity is the bystander at the
left border of the frame. Through cropping, the image easily could have
eliminated the figure without sacrificing any other important element in
the composition such as the text on the marquee, but Weegee chose to
retain him. With the two police officers and other bystanders attentive to
the fatal truth of the moment, this figure alone breaks the self-contained,
intimate drama of the sight. Consisting only of a face and hat, the rest
of him matted from view by the picture border, the figure is present as
a synecdoche for a greater mass of spectators, those who look upon the
event in the form of a press photograph, as we do now.
The presence of a photographer is for him for the moment of greater
interest than the lifeless human being. The movie title and this figure
break the security and immunity that would otherwise be available
through a voyeuristic “fourth wall” effect in the photograph and that
would allow one to consume a spectacle of death entirely without selfconsciousness. The curious look of this curiosity seeker betokens a small
component within the everyday diversions and satisfactions of the living,
no matter how grim their source.
Grotesquely reflexive as well are the layers of newspaper used to cover
the corpse. They have been used in this way presumably “out of respect”
for the dead until a more proper cover is provided, as the police appear
[76.214.138.251] Project MUSE (2024-07-15 02:37 GMT)Figure 7.2. Weegee, Joy of Living, April 17, 1942. International Center of Photography/
Getty Images.NEW YORK SIGHTS
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to be doing at this point. Many pages are heavily illustrated with press
photographs and picture advertisements. The pile of newsprint eliminates from the scene the victim as a human figure. The only remaining
vestige of his humanity is a pair of shoes, splayed apart in a posture of
rest. Several such Weegee street photographs register the debris left in the
wake of everyday living, and the newspaper figures as the most familiar
and readily disposable of such items. Over this fact Weegee displays
none of the furor of a Jeremiah as Nathanael West does in The Day of
the Locust, which says of the onlookers gathered for a premiere outside
a movie palace: “Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They
realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day
of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed
them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests,
fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of
them. . . . Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack
minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed” (Novels, 381).
While the novel’s invoice of tabloid sensationalism is remarkably similar
to the ones provided by Weegee and Sam Fuller, these two men accepted
the situation as a plain inescapable fact of a media culture—one ripe with
thematic and stylistic opportunities for the knowing participant, as they
were. Of course Nathanael West was also a knowing participant during
much of the 1930s with professional contracts with movie studios despite
the deep misgivings expressed in private, in his novels, and in a public
talk “Makers of Mass Neuroses,” delivered November 1936 to a writers
congress and focused on the power of Hollywood to corrupt the minds
of its audience.
Weegee crafted a sensationalist yet detached style that has retained
much currency in the tabloid, fashion, and art worlds. Asymmetries in
composition and lighting and disproportions among a scene’s elements
are prominent in his camera and darkroom style. There results in some
Weegee photographs a visual effect of disequilibrium that can border on
vertigo. Some art critics consider his photography to belong to a stylistic
trend of “American abstract sensationalism.”11 The designation, however,
overstates a claim of abstraction for his news scene photographs, which
remain resolutely representational. His rendering of violence or calamity
often entails contradiction in the emotional mood of the aftermath to
an event, but that moment is delineated as an actuality. The outlook on
human mayhem generally offered by Weegee is bemused and impassive.
That outlook suggests an uncynical stoicism, one endowed with a ready
sense of the absurd.CHAPTER 7
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Within Weegee’s photography the eventful and the accidental pertain
not only to subject matter. In his images the injured, the deceased, or a
wreckage can be cast by events into a position remarkable in its awkwardness or absurdity that, beyond its factuality, takes graphic dominance within the photographic frame. Given the contingencies of such
scenes, Weegee often could not reliably predict or control where shadows
and reflections would fall once the flash was discharged. Admirers of his
work like Colin Westerbeck and photographer Joel Meyerowitz value
this unforeseen quality. In their estimation, Weegee frequently “shot in
the dark, seldom being able to predict what, if anything, he would get.
This reliance on blind chance to get some of his most effective pictures is
obvious.”12 Bruce Downes, the editor of an amateur photography handbook, prizes the sheer, shock brilliance from the flash in Weegee photographs: “This is a world seen through the camera’s artificial eye, which
alone is capable of recording what happens when some 15 to 60 thousand
lumen-seconds of light are concentrated into a split-second interval. This
amounts to an explosion in which Weegee literally blasts the faces of his
subjects with an intense spray of photons” (Weegee, 3–4). The camera
practices of Weegee were so rooted in the use of flash illumination that
the photographer often continued to employ flash for daylight images.
Diane Arbus would later elaborate this technique to powerfully grotesque
effect in her photography.
With some Weegee photographs the flash seems to have illuminated
a curiosity as much for the benefit of spectators as for the camera shot.
Some bystanders are animated by the uncommon sight, others remain
expressionless in the face of it, a few on the fringes have not as yet
focused their attention. For its part, the camera’s attention can tend
toward spectators within the spectacle more than toward the street incident in its own right. With their attention to the public, Weegee’s crime
scene photographs differ greatly from the conventions of pictures taken
by the police as forensic documents. In his book Evidence Luc Sante has
reproduced and annotated fifty-five pictures taken by New York City
police photographers, most of them to document homicides, in the years
1914–1918.13 For most of the photographs the police have kept pedestrians and spectators well away from the corpse and the immediate area
of the crime scene. In Weegee’s coverage of such events, the police seem
to allow both his camera and onlookers fairly close proximity.
The body of an automobile accident victim in one 1938 Weegee photograph seems to be irrelevant for the moment to the crowd gathered,
which seems uniform in their interest in the camera, probably in response
to the photographer’s request to look in its direction (fig. 7.3). In a 1940NEW YORK SIGHTS
[131 ]
photograph of the life-saving attempt made over a swimmer at Coney
Island rescuers concentrate fully on the victim while a young woman in
bathing suit among them has looked up and a smile has come automatically to her face for the camera. Her smile is among the disarming, unaccountable reactions of people caught by Weegee’s camera on the scene of
disaster. The young woman has instinctively posed, but in more candid
glimpses analogous effects are evident, as with the 1939 photograph
Murder at the Feast of San Gennaro, where a uniformed officer’s amused
Figure 7.3. Weegee, Auto Accident Victim, 1938. International Center of Photography/Getty Images.
[76.214.138.251] Project MUSE (2024-07-15 02:37 GMT)CHAPTER 7
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expression is directed toward a poker-faced detective as both men stand
over a corpse.
Naked City devotes its second chapter to “The Curious Ones” who
congregate at such street incidents and a later chapter to “The Escapists,”
who consist of circus and show audiences, dancers on the ballroom floor,
and tenement kids delighted with an open fire hydrant. From Weegee’s
perspective these people do not belong to a caste of the cheated and
betrayed, as Nathanael West would have it.14 At its outset The Day of the
Locust identifies the city’s bystanders as a menacing presence: “When
their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred” (Novels, 242). There
persists on their faces “an expression of vicious acrid boredom that trembled on the edge of violence” (Novels, 320–21). For Weegee, to the contrary, chance spectators are his desired audience, his paying customers. A
later chapter in Naked City celebrates the spectrum of emotions displayed
by a young female spectator over a performance by Frank Sinatra on
stage at the Paramount Theater. The blasts of light from Weegee’s flash
and the instantaneous effect of his shutter in these candid portraits are
consonant with the transports of a starstruck fan.The first chapter to Naked City, “Sunday Morning in Manhattan,” shows
inhabitants of the city asleep, many in public spaces like stoops, park
benches, fire escapes, parked automobiles, sidewalks. Within two chapters this motif is transfigured into portrayals of the big sleep, “Murder”
and “Sudden Death,” captured by the camera in similar locales. Such
linkages have led critics like Ellen Handy to approach the book as a “collective portrait of the city [that] marks it as a place of infinite stories” and
to esteem Weegee as an “urban storyteller par excellence.”15 Beyond a few
such structural parallels, however, the representational axis of the book’s
prose and pictures remains far more descriptive and depictive than narrative. A characteristic sample from its text, with its original elliptical
mannerisms intact, demonstrates this assertion: “The men, women and
children who commit murders always fascinate me . . . I always ask them
why they killed . . . the men claim self defense, the women seem to be in
a daze . . . but as a rule frustrated love and jealousy are the cause . . . the
kids are worried for fear the picture might not make the papers” (Naked
City, 160). The casual, blanket generalizations and a temporality in the
continuous present keep the prose far removed from narrative functions.
Alain Bergala reaches a similar finding when he observes of the book’s
properties in pictures and words of “narrative disconnection” that “the
very significant general atmosphere matters more than the story.”16
The historical survey Photography 1839–1937 organized by Beaumont
Newhall for the Museum of Modern Art in 1937 included news photoNEW YORK SIGHTS
[133 ]
graphs as a distinct category within the medium. But the exhibition, the
catalogue, and the Newhall book Photography: A Short Critical History
(1938) contained only a few press images. At that point it was still too
early in Weegee’s career for his work to be included. When Newhall prepared The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day for publication in 1949 Weegee’s work is acknowledged for a quality of “social caricature” that results from “unreal lighting of the flash from the camera.”
By the book’s aesthetic standards of “naturalistic” composition, however,
this quality is of limited value since in flash photography “the results
were, for the most part, grotesque, because the harsh front light flattened
out faces, cast unpleasant shadows, and fell so abruptly that backgrounds
were unrelieved black.”17 Obviously, in Newhall’s evaluation grotesque is
strictly a pejorative, employed without a sense of its history or traditions
within the graphic arts.
Talk of art in connection with Weegee’s photography began in the
early 1940s, prompted in part by its exhibition at the Photo League and
the Museum of Modern Art and promoted energetically by Weegee himself and by admirers in the press world. William McCleery, an editor
at PM Daily, was one of the first to sloganeer for consideration of his
photographs as art, and a demanding art at that: “Of course Weegee,
being an Artist, has his own conception of what constitutes beauty, and
in some cases it is hard for us to share his conception” (Naked City, 6).
With the development of a profitable market in photography in more
recent decades, this kind of art talk has intensified. Louis Stettner, an
American photographer who worked for many years in Europe and a
friend of Weegee, acknowledges that a problem is presented by the man’s
seeming lack of aesthetic judgment: “In the course of his career he produced more than five thousand photographs and never discarded any!
The classic Weegees are mixed in with many minor photographs and
those taken for purely bread-and-butter commercial reasons.”18 Weegee’s
posture of rogue expertise in the news business did little to alter this
impression: “I kept no files. I put my extra prints and negatives into a
barrel. If anybody wanted a fire or a murder shot, my two daily specials,
I’d tell him to come down and search for them. Or, better still, he could
wait and, within twenty-four hours, I’d have new ones for him” (Weegee,
65). Stettner attempts to overcome the difficulty, though his rhetoric and
logic quickly prove inadequate to the task: “Weegee’s best works are,
in essence, news photographs whose profundity and significance have
lifted them up into the realm of art. True, they have come in by the back
door. So what? When they were first made, he was called an artist and
his photographs were deemed creative and interesting.”19CHAPTER 7
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Weegee once remarked to celebrity columnist Earl Wilson, in a line
likely to have been well rehearsed: “You are amazed and mystified by
the fabulous Weegee. . . . You’re surprised by my oddacity.”20 To reporters
in more professional contexts, Weegee was given to art comparisons,
though they could prove wildly unpredictable in their relevance. With
one interviewer he made this claim of sophistication in the composition
of his photographs: “I use the camera like a painter uses a brush; I am the
Renoir of the lens.” The same article contains a contrary, but no less art
historical self-assessment: “I’m very primitive; in fact, I’m the Grandma
Moses of Photography.” As readily, Weegee would acknowledge that all
art talk was part of “my vaudeville act.”21 In a suggestive comparison
with the early work of Andy Warhol, David Hopkins takes as exemplary
a precedent set by “the way in which [Weegee] had crossed over, seemingly effortlessly, from the sphere of popular journalism to ‘high’ art.”
Within the museum world Weegee had been “elevated from the status
of commercially driven opportunist to someone deemed to possess a
superior personal vision.”22 In about 1959 Warhol cultivated a similar
transformation by placing the kinds of work he did as a commercial
graphic designer into fine arts contexts.
Extravagant aesthetic praise for Weegee has come from French commentators. The canonizing Collection Photo Poche series arranged by the
Centre Nationale de la Photographie in Paris assesses Weegee’s stature in
these terms, authored by André Laude: “He was an authentic, a great, a
genius of a photographer. He transcended the daily spectacle of horror,
of ugliness and of violence. . . . Weegee’s art—because it is art—resides in
that grasping of the truth, captured in the immediate reality and glimpsed
in the most dramatic fashion.” To counter any cheapening associations
with lowbrow mass appeal and sensational diversions, this commentary insists that “Weegee’s anti-intellectualism is a sort of travesty of his
true, profound art.”23 In the catalogue to a touring exhibition of Weegee
photographs held in private hands, the praise could readily double as
promotional copy intended for the collector of photography as art. This
1999 exhibition acclaims Weegee as a humanist and social documentarian
in the tradition of American Depression-era photography: “He turns an
eye full of melancholy and nostalgia upon the lonely, the abandoned,
the wistful and despairing. Weegee the philanthropist, makes the image
of mankind the centre of his research, and focuses on the transience of
happiness and pride, on the instability of social standing and material
security.” For more contemporary tastes, the catalogue adopts an altogether separate tack in proposing that Weegee “might be regarded as anNEW YORK SIGHTS
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early or premature conceptual artist who counters with a commentary
the image of his age.”24
Several American art critics, however, have expressed deep reservations over the tabloid purposes of Weegee’s photographs, ambiguities
in their affective tenor, and questions of privacy in the cases of the sufferers depicted. For Colin L. Westerbeck their treatment of violent subject matter is problematic: “His pictures turn catastrophe to comedy too
easily. . . . Weegee found it laughable.” The critic acknowledges an immediacy of visual impact in this photography but imputes to the photographer “cruelty” in his motives and practices.25 To be sure, Weegee would
wisecrack in print about street murders among criminals as a “slum
clearance project” (caption in Weegee, between 64–65). The photographs
of such events might register mockery, but as just one among a range of
reactions plain on the faces of onlookers and emergency personnel. Their
First Murder (1941), with its mixed crowd of adults and children, vast
variations in the direction of the individuals’ attention, and disparate
states of awareness over what has happened, is an emotional hodgepodge (fig. 7.4). In the tumult of the moment what might appear to be a
grin may well have been in fact a grimace, indifference in fact involvement. Much the same is true in the mob scene at the conclusion to The
Day of the Locust. Both are cases of incongruity and irony without the
laughter.
Weegee images with the greatest immediacy, Westerbeck charges, are
the same ones “where the greatest antipathy appears to have existed.
The very qualities that are the most distressing in his work—his aggressiveness and disregard for the feeling of his subjects—are also his most
durable qualities.”26 John Coplans has reached largely the same conclusion: “There is a demonic edge to Weegee’s quirky endeavor that bears
discussion. Many of his photographs are morally dubious, not just because
of their evident prurience, or his antisocial attitudes or even his outrageous hucksterism—it’s that he sold for money images that exposed and
exploited the involuntary, naked emotions of people he photographed
without their permission, often by deliberately spying. One does sense
animus in Weegee.”27 As for intrusiveness, the kind of street coverage
Weegee filed was well within the professional standards of American
journalism of the time, though admittedly some would question the
integrity of such standards. Weegee followed an established guideline:
on “accident or rescue stories and where the pictures include policemen
and firemen . . . neither permissions nor releases are needed except when
photographs are used to advertise commercial products” (Naked City,
[76.214.138.251] Project MUSE (2024-07-15 02:37 GMT)Figure 7.4. Weegee, Their First Murder, October 9, 1941. International Center of Photography/Getty Images.NEW YORK SIGHTS
[137 ]
242–43). The obvious presence of a camera the size of a Speed Graphic
and the relatively proximate distance it requires belie charges of spying
in regard to his street photography. Awareness and acceptance of the
camera among onlookers is quite apparent in many images. And many
of the events recorded took place after all in social spaces where the
individual’s behavior and appearance are directly on view to a public.
The same holds true for semi-public spaces such as the movie theater, the
opera house, and the beach at nighttime, where Weegee’s method was in
fact partly secretive, through the use of infrared photography.
The harshest critique of Weegee’s sensibility has come from Max
Kozloff, who detects in it an underlying “allegiance to slapstick and
Keystone” that causes “his freelance crime scenes often [to] look comedic
when they’re supposed to be forensic.” To scenes of actual violence and
suffering the photographs bring, in Kozloff’s judgment, a “flip and inconsequent tone” that is distracting and impertinent.28 On the occasion of
the major exhibition New York: Capital of Photography, which opened at
the Jewish Museum in New York City in 2002, Kozloff as co-curator was
obviously obliged to include Weegee images. The critic’s essay for the
exhibition catalog continues in the previous vein, labeling the photographer “a gymnast of disparagement, almost asking you not to take him
seriously.” In the aggregate, the essay alleges, his photographs “comprise
a portfolio of indiscretions that could only have been motivated by the
needs of a voyeur.”29 A major rationale for the exhibition is that the New
York City depicted in American photography over the twentieth century
is largely a product of Jewish consciousness and that the imagery reflects
social and aesthetic approaches related to Jewish tradition. In this context
as well Weegee, though obviously Jewish, is treated by the critic as something of a pariah. Kozloff charges that by 1940 Weegee had betrayed the
traditions of social photography: “Private moments of the neglected and
aggrieved ceased to be object lessons in political morality, and became
fair game on the daily, human round.”30 The assault on privacy is certainly one aspect of Weegee’s work, where it can be recognized as part of
his photographic practices and as subject matter, as a prominent behavior
in modern urban culture.
The varied dynamics of spectatorship recorded within so many of
Weegee’s photographs document, for one thing, that voyeurism in public
places is widely stimulated by mass culture and that it is in truth a
social rather than a private practice. The comparison to Andy Warhol’s
early work, specifically in this instance to the Disaster silkscreen series of
1962–63, lead David Hopkins to conclude that Weegee’s habitual inclusion of spectators exemplifies “the historical instantiation of a vacantCHAPTER 7
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or neutralized subjectivity.” Even where Weegee’s spectators display
obvious affect in their responses, his argument continues, “subjectivity
reasserts itself precisely in the neutralized mode described by Warhol.”31
But Weegee’s camera vision and the looks in the eyes of his spectators
are too demonstrably sentient to be generalized in such a way. To be sure,
the deadpan is one among a full repertory of responses, but in addition
to being psychologically neutral the deadpan can be an assumed, calculated stance. Complicating matters, it is manifest in some Weegee pictures
that emotions of the moment are uncertain or they misapprehend the
enormity of the event. A grotesque attitude toward the scene is reflected
in the indeterminacy among the spectators who have gathered, attracted
variously by the scene or by the crowd itself, by a presence of the police
or firemen, by the sight of Weegee’s camera.
The life of black Americans in New York City receives some consideration in Weegee’s work of the 1930s and 1940s, but the photographer’s
sense of race relations is not inflected by an attitude of the grotesque.
As a matter of fact, his images of African Americans are ingenuously
respectful toward their suffering, their joys, their formal public occasions,
and their entertainments. All these aspects of experience are represented
within the Harlem chapter to Naked City. In a sequence of three photographs the daytime scene of shrouded victims who had been trampled to
death at a social event contains no contingent elements (such as a public
sign) or variations in emotional tone that would contradict the temper
of disbelief and anguish. Among the police and survivors no untoward
expressions or gestures appear.
Two other photographs depict the celebratory occasion of Easter
Sunday. Leaving services, black church members dressed in finery appear
as a congenial, dignified group that welcomes a photograph portrait.
These two images stand in diametric opposition to the book’s earlier
portrayal of society patrons at the opera in their opulence and with their
air of condescension. A well-spirited sense of humor, shared by photographer and subject, is conveyed in a photograph of a young African
American man contained in the “Fires” section. Descending an escape
ladder while clad only in a trench coat and hat, the man is fully aware of
the comedy of the sight he makes and he has paused to greet the camera
with a broad smile.
The chapter’s attitude toward public disorder and crime in Harlem
is by turns lenient or lightly comedic. Either way, its attitude is devoid
of parodic and grotesque elements. In a large nighttime crowd scene,
reported in a caption as “the actual birth of a riot in Harlem,” the attenFigure 7.5. Weegee, “Here is the actual birth of a riot in Harlem,” in Naked City (1945). International Center of
Photography/Getty Images.
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tion of all but two or three individuals is directed elsewhere than the
camera and overall the crowd appears watchful and restrained (Naked
City, 192) (fig. 7.5). The object of their interest is off-frame and to the
side, and this arrangement deflects any tension that would arise if the
crowd were positioned frontally, with the viewer of the photograph in the
path of its intent focus. The caption reads as a gross overstatement since
nothing in the image indicates that these people are about to break into
destructive action. In portraying subsequent events, the chapter descends
into the kind of inept and tasteless jokes to which Weegee was often
prone. The picture of a jumble of female mannequins in a broken shop
front is accompanied by the tag line “America’s pure white womanhood
is saved from a fate worse than . . . Death” (Naked City, 194). And the
pictures indulge in a cartoonish visual pun when the photograph of a
black man under arrest is paired with one on the facing page of a smiling
black man in prison stripes at a costume party. None of these pictures or
words demonstrate a mature engagement with the racial grotesque.
Weegee prefaces the Harlem chapter with brief comments on discrimination (“that’s the one ugly word for it”) and on the causes of race riots
(Naked City, 190). His remarks, however, disregard entirely New York
City’s history of race politics, activism, and riots, and they misunderstand the meaning of recent events. Though contemporary Harlem is the
stated context, the chapter explains riots in terms of “poorly paid white
people” who react to social change “by throwing rocks into the windows
of the colored occupants” who have recently moved into white, working
class districts (Naked City, 190). The explanation is irrelevant to this context, obviously, and it ignores completely the roots of the serious civil disorder in Harlem that occurred in March 1935 and again in August 1943.
Both events had been a prominent subject of news stories and official
inquiries in the period when Weegee worked for the daily press. Of the
1935 riot the Federal Writers’ Project Panorama volume on New York City
reports that the mayor’s investigating committee determined that “the
outbreak had its fundamental causes in the terrible economic and social
conditions prevailing in Harlem” (Panorama, 142). The riot photographs
in Naked City depict the 1943 event, but this fact is apparent only through
internal evidence and a reader’s prior knowledge since the captions and
commentary provide no reportorial context.
Over the same period portrait photographer James Van Der Zee
continued to concentrate on the “talented tenth” of Harlem society as
he had done through the 1920s. Aaron Siskind of the Photo League
attended to many other elements within Harlem’s population. In 1936
Siskind organized a Feature Group for the League, and his first underNEW YORK SIGHTS
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taking was a comprehensive record of domestic and commercial life in
the area, which he had been photographing since 1932. Though some
images were exhibited and published over the years, Siskind’s Harlem
Document was issued in book form only much later, in 1981.32 His work
exemplifies a social documentary style and purpose where Weegee’s
images on the same subject clearly do not. Siskind’s interests encompass a full expanse of locales, from litter-strewn air shafts, abandoned
buildings, rooming houses, and cramped kitchenette apartments to
storefront churches, local shops, restaurants, the Apollo Theater, and
the Savoy Ballroom. The activities and social roles depicted also reflect
great diversity. These include daily routines within tenement flats, kids
at play in the street, sidewalk vendors, followers of Father Divine, an
orderly protest at the relief office, a meeting of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, nameless entertainers, common laborers, and
churchgoers. Siskind’s composition in regard to scale and the frame
typically makes the immediate surroundings as important to the picture
as its human subjects. While Weegee often sought a quality of candor
and the momentary in his portrayal of individuals, Siskind seems to
have informally arranged a good number of his portrait subjects into
typifying postures or gestures.
With the publication of Naked City in 1945 Weegee went on a national
promotional tour. The book received laudatory reviews in weekly news
and culture magazines like Newsweek, the Saturday Review, and Time,
which acclaimed the photographer as a “poet with a camera.”33 Even
the New York Times included some reluctant words of praise in a negative review. Vogue was now interested in his services and Weegee redirected his energies toward fashion and society photography. With rights
to the title Naked City sold to a studio producer for a feature film, in
1947 Weegee left for Hollywood. For a period of five years there Weegee
worked as a production consultant and a bit movie player, and he made
experimental short films. By the time of his return to New York in 1952
Weegee had begun to use distortion lenses and other mechanical devices
to manipulate photographs. His contorted, caricatural portraits of celebrities and politicians began to appear in major magazines. From this time
until his death in 1968 Weegee contracted to photograph advertising
campaigns, official functions, and public figures but no longer crime or
disaster. He also lectured widely, traveled in Europe on assignment, and
wrote an autobiography remarkable mainly for its braggadocio.
In 1946 the photographer published Weegee’s People, an anodyne compilation of recent images. The book presents New York as a city without
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in doorways are fully illuminated, out to the margins of the frame. The
darkness of night does not intrude upon the scene; there is no incipient
blackness to disturb this local color sight. The book’s only coverage of
a fire, in two photographs, is presented with the reassurance “Everyone
was saved.”34 Most of its pictures contain no spectators within the frame.
Its street views are typically on the order of the familiar and harmless
(lovers on park bench) or the comfortably humorous (the floating, oversized hand of an inflated clown in the Macy Thanksgiving Day parade).
City streets at night are depicted without a hint of disaster or terror. In
fact, nighttime is portrayed as essentially joyous through indoor photographs of clubs, cabarets, dance halls, rent parties, jam sessions, and
masquerades.
The 1953 book Naked Hollywood, prepared in collaboration with Mel
Harris, presents Weegee’s responses to the American dream factory and
mass culture.35 Its purview, however, does not take in the dark and grotesque side to this segment of society that for Nathanael West was its
most prominent feature. Naked Hollywood, it must be said, adopts a tritely
humorous approach to its subject, with a heavy dependence upon distortion photographs. It exhibits an adolescent mentality in portraits that
focus exclusively on the backs of heads or on female cleavage and in
corny joke images of fans, animal actors, and movie people, in one case
matching a backstage glimpse of the Academy Awards with one backstage in a burlesque house. The book’s material is all offered palatably,
tongue in cheek.
As crime and disaster had been Weegee’s professional specialties
over the previous period, from the late 1940s into the 1960s distortions
and trick shots became his trademark, which he promoted with carnival
show enthusiasm. He boasted of having invented a new Weegeescope
lens for the camera and he devised a “fun and art” marketing strategy
in answer to the era’s “fun and profit” advertising campaigns: “I’ve
managed to turn . . . dull pictures into hilarious caricatures and artistic
studies.”36 His 1959 “how-to” book, Weegee’s Creative Camera, promises to
reveal to the public for the first time the compositional innovations and
“extraordinarily successful” techniques over which he has held a “kind
of monopoly [that] succeeded in giving me a fine income.”37 Supporters
like Louis Stettner remained loyal to such self-acclaim: “In spite of his
commercial lust, Weegee was too much of an artist not to be genuinely
interested in the creative possibilities of manipulation.” The principal
effect of caricature, however, arises in the rhetoric used to legitimize the
Weegee contrivances, not in the images themselves. Stettner explicates
the photographer’s newfound creativity thusly: “He evolved his ownNEW YORK SIGHTS
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symbolic sexography, satirically creating overflowing cornucopias of sensuality—three, five, nine breasts; buttocks and legs galore.”38
Weegee, it can be said, conducted the second act of his professional
life largely as a self-promotion campaign. Weegee’s autobiography, published in 1961, does not possess the grotesque attitude manifest in many
photographs of the 1930s and 1940s. The book presents no darker aspects
to his personality meant to be illuminated in the course of the life story.
Instead, its prose cracks wise in the clipped bravado of a street tough
designed along the lines of a Damon Runyon type. The description of
the precinct headquarters on East Fifty-first Street, for example, explains:
“For a guy to be booked there, he had to make an advance reservation
and bring two letters of reference from the wardens of Alcatraz and Sing
Sing. There the detectives looked like capitalists and read the Wall Street
Journal” (Weegee, 60). Elsewhere, in pretending insider knowledge of mob
activities, Weegee praises its members’ sense of professionalism: “Each
murder was a masterpiece . . . perfect . . . each displayed the unmistakable stamp of the Old Masters” (Weegee, 73; ellipses original to the text).
The autobiography likens the freelance press photographer to an urban
knight errant and private eye. In this character role Weegee makes a quest
through the city equipped with an automobile, photographic gear, cigars,
snacks, and fresh underclothes. Such a self-portrait is, at best, amusing
low comedy. In his own final estimation, properly cast for the occasion in
the third person, “Weegee is the last of the giants of photography’s roisterous adolescence” (Weegee, 159). Like the rhetoric of his autobiography,
Weegee’s camera caricatures and distortions are all immature artifice,
ungrounded in a mature imagination’s more obscure reaches of shared
experience or perspectives. The palpable qualities of the grotesque in his
early press work, on the other hand, arise from an image’s found connections and extemporaneous perspectives on the terrible and the trivial.
IN THE 1940S AND 1950S several photographers pursued an interest
in New York by night, and the most significant among them are Louis
Faurer, Ted Croner, and William Klein. While Weegee relied upon a
sudden punctuation with light by means of flash, these three photographers tended toward nightscapes defined by city lights in locations
like Times Square, Broadway, and 42nd Street. In such locales at night
a myriad of lights emanates from marquees and billboards, storefronts,
streetlamps, automobile headlights, and the reflections from wet pavement, display glass, and the polished surfaces of buildings and cars. For
the purposes of the photographer, however, the problems of available
light for the image persist in such circumstances. Faurer, Croner, and
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Klein commonly had to push film speeds and developing processes to
their limits. And their photographs often bear the consequences in losses
to focus, perspective, contrast, and proportionality. These consequences
fully separate their work from traditions of straight or objective photography. The results can entail distortion, but usually as a collateral,
subordinate dimension to the photograph rather than its sole purpose,
as in Weegee’s manipulations.
Louis Faurer began to work in New York in 1946, at first commuting
from Philadelphia, and midtown Manhattan quickly became a favored
subject. For night scenes on the streets and in public buildings, Faurer
used the small format Leica camera without flash illumination, experimenting with prolonged shutter times. Through this means Faurer produced a number of photographs that are suggestively intricate in their
play of half-light and muted reflections and in their echoes of profiles
and indefinite forms. Ted Croner came to New York in 1945 and started a
fashion studio business. For personal photography Croner also gravitated
toward midtown at night, the luminosity of which he explored through
techniques of multiple exposure and camera movements, made with the
shutter held open to create novel streaking and blur effects. He was
drawn to places like cafeterias and the circus with their unique and sometimes expressionistic lighting arrangements. By comparison to Weegee’s
early work, photographs by Faurer and Croner possess an uneventful
quality, even in the case of Croner’s circus performance images. The
contrasts of light and night remain dense and extensive in their photographs in order to convey abstract patterns and graceful stylizations, not
grotesque revelations taken from everyday city life.
Raised in New York City, William Klein remained in Paris after army
service during World War II to study painting, which he did briefly under
the guidance of Fernand Léger. Klein developed a geometric abstract
style that he explored further through photography, initially by putting
his paintings in motion and recording the effects with a camera. Hired
to photograph for Vogue, Klein returned to New York in 1954, after an
absence of six years. Once back, he recalled decades later, he embarked
on a personal project to wield the camera “with a vengeance” and with
“a peculiar double vision half native, half foreigner” and take “hundreds
of photos a day looting the streets.” Having in mind a future book of
his own design, Klein knowingly produced some of the “least publishable pictures of the day” even while he played upon “the clichés of the
era’s fashion photography.”39 For these purposes he adopted a mindset
of sensationalism: “I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines.NEW YORK SIGHTS
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This is what New York deserved and would get. The thing I took as my
inspiration was all over the place, three million a day, blowing in the
gutter, overflowing ashcans. . . . I was never after news, of course, just
the dumbest, most ordinary stuff. But I liked, as further distancing, the
garish urgency of their front-page scoops. So I would try to photograph
schlock non-events.”40
Klein named his book Life is Good and Good for You in New York: Trance
Witness Revels. The subtitle is a calculated spoonerism that plays upon the
tabloid-style headline phrase “chance witness reveals.” After New York
publishers refused the book, it was released in 1956 in Europe.41 On the
streets Klein had worked with a Leica mounted with a wide-angle lens
as the standard equipment for his project: “I had no philosophy about
it. When I looked in the viewfinder and realized I could see all the contradictions and confusion that was there with the wide-angle—that was
what was great.”42 On location day and night without flash, Klein was
willing to photograph at extreme close range, often in situations where
contrast and focus were not greatly under his control. After his experiences in studio art and the fashion world, Klein sought through this
photography to escape conventions of the hard edge and careful design.
And indeed heavy grain, blurring, ungainly contrasts, gritty textures,
accidental effects, and cockeyed compositions proliferate in Life is Good.
Several images are remarkable for oversaturated black tones that do not
shadow or obscure some important feature but rather constitute a presence of darkness in its own right.
In several images it is apparent that Klein has pressed point-blank
with his camera into crowds on street corners or at public pastimes, an
action paralleled in the book’s pictures of children at play with guns.
The parallel is a reflexive acknowledgment on the photographer’s part of
his playful and aggressive activity in shooting images of the city. Klein’s
close shots are not parodic and “elephantine” in the spirit of Nathanael
West’s stylistic giganticism. Closeups in Life is Good often bring a sight
uncomfortably near, as when a child thrusts out with a toy revolver
aimed directly toward the camera and thus perpetually toward viewers
of the photograph. In these respects, more than in specifics of subject
matter, Klein exhibits an intense, engaged interest that bluffs violence.
Weegee’s interests are typically directed toward matters of fact and found
ironies left in the wake of violence. Both Weegee and Klein are engaged
in a modernist project of doing violence to traditions and accepted norms
of representation.