Weegee

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

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.

Photographic career

Photographic technique

Main article:

ƒ/8 and be there

Most 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

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

In 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

Vogue

.

Naked City (1945) was his first book of photographs. Film producer

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 1960s

Weegee experimented with

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]

Legacy

Weegee 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

• 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 there

References

Further reading

• Barth, Miles; Bergala, Alain; and Handy, Ellen. Weegee's World. Boston: Little Brown, 1997.
• Lee, Anthony W. and Meyer, Richard. Weegee and Naked City. (Defining Moments in American Photography.)
• Purcell, Kerry William. Weegee. (Phaidon, 2004).
• Weegee. Weegee by Weegee (1961 (revised, reprinted, and retitled as Weegee: The Autobiography, 2013), autobiography).

External links

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• New York Times, June 20, 2008, "Crime Was Weegee's Oyster"
• Wired News, June 29, 2009, "'You Gotta Get It'—Words of Wisdom from Weegee"
• Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama
• Weegee archive on eMuseum.icp.org, all works © International Center of Photography
• Arthur "Weegee" Fellig at
  IMDb
• BOMB Magazine self-interview with Arthur Fellig (Summer 1987)