From Crime Scenes to Celebrities: How Weegee Reinvented His Photography
Photographer Arthur Felig, better known as Weegee, captured the gritty side of 1940s New York City and was known for his uncanny ability to arrive at a crime scene before the police did.
But as well as photographing murder scenes, fires, and car crashes, Weegee later moved to the West Coast where he captured celebrities of the day like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy.
His latter work has often been disregarded in photography circles but a new book and exhibition, Weegee: Society of the Spectacle, seeks to reconcile the photographer’s two different bodies of work.
The exhibit at the International Center of Photography in New York City explores Weegee’s contrasting works. “At the beginning of this project was a kind of puzzling question,” exhibit curator Clément Chéroux tells The Guardian, “it’s as if you had in the same body a Walker Evans and a Man Ray. How could the same photographer do that?”
F/8 And Be There
Weegee is arguably the most famous spot news photographer of the mid-20th century and is credited with the phrase “f/8 and be there” which describes the technique at the time of simply being present at the scene and shooting with a small aperture so that the photo would mostly be in focus.
An immigrant from what is now Ukraine, Weegee left school early to take odd jobs; one of them being a photographer’s assistant. He worked in darkrooms, developing photos for others before becoming a freelance news photographer in the 1930s.
The origins of his name are a mystery — one theory is that he got it for endlessly using a squeegee to take water off photographic prints while working at the New York Times’s film lab. Another is that it’s a phonetic play on the word “Ouija,” owing to his apparent supernatural ability to arrive at crime scenes so quickly. But in reality, he had access to a police scanner in his car and would monitor emergency calls.
Regardless, it was this period when he took many of his most famous news pictures that became art in their own right. In 1945, he released his first book Naked City which would inspire a film by the same name.
In addition to crime scenes, Weegee photographed poor neighborhoods, strange people in bars, and the corpses of gangsters, always with 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. His work would later inspire photographers like Diane Arbus.
His work in Hollywood saw him experiment in the darkroom, distorting his photos so his subjects looked like strange monstrosities.
“This is very rare in the story of photography of the 20th century,” Chéroux tells The Guardian,. “I don’t know of any other photographer who had that same polarity — being both interested in what was right in front of the camera, and then also so interested in the darkroom manipulations”
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is on view at the International Center of Photography in New York from January 23 to May 5. A book of the same name accompanies the major exhibit.
