Weegee’s photographs

Black, white and blood red

The sordid beauty of the city

Jan 28th 2012 | NEW YORK | from the print edition of the Economist

Stop and stare

WEEGEE’S photographs of the seamy side of New York are luridly fascinating: car crashes, tenement fires and lifeless bodies sprawled across pavements. He always carried a Speed Graphic camera with a massive flash in his nocturnal prowls around the city, which made his night-time shots both intelligible and distinctive. The extreme contrasts in black and white were perfectly suited to the extreme situations he depicted, with people who were generally weeping, leering or dead.

Born Usher Fellig in 1899 in a part of the world that is now Ukraine, Weegee moved with his family to New York’s Lower East Side in 1909. His nickname came either from an early stint as a “squeegee boy” (ie, a darkroom assistant) or from his Ouija-like ability to get to a crime scene faster than the authorities—though this clairvoyance owed much to his police radio.

“Murder Is My Business”, a new exhibition at the International Center of Photography (ICP), takes its name from two shows Weegee held at the Photo League in 1941. Drawn from the ICP’s vast archive of his work—a gift from his longtime companion, Wilma Wilcox, in 1993—these photos are from the first decade of his career. Weegee would later give up tabloid snaps and experiment with film and art photography. He died in 1968. But these early images, crafted for maximum effect and immediate consumption, as in “Hold-up Man Killed, November 24th 1941” (pictured above), show him at his popular and populist best.

These photos are displayed against a soundscape of police sirens and jazz, with a selection of the newspaper clippings where they first appeared. Viewing Weegee’s shots with the accompanying text grants a sense of the social and economic ferment of the time. New Yorkers could open the paper and read about three women who had been trampled to death in a stampede. Another 1941 shot, “Killing for a Warm Glass of Beer” includes a dog hovering indifferently over a dead body in a bar.

Weegee considered himself a journalist first, peddling his wares to the city’s seedier dailies, but he was also an artist with a keen sense of composition. Although his subject was crime, his pictures often included the craned necks and gawking looks of bystanders. Weegee’s fascination with the voyeurs who crowd murder scenes is given pride of place in a 1941 clipping from PM Daily, “Brooklyn School Children See Gambler Murdered in Street”. His large photo of the ogling schoolchildren dwarfs a much smaller shot of the murdered body on the page. A girl in front angles her neck to get a better look, her eyes wide; a blond boy beams with what looks to be sheer joy. The newspaper’s editors cropped the image around the faces, whereas Weegee’s wider shot includes the menacing silhouettes of several low-slung buildings against a darkening sky.

Weegee lacked formal training, but he knew how to give people what they want: naked emotions, grisly details. It is illuminating to view these images now, when tabloid photography has become no less garish and closer to ubiquitous. Weegee understood the difference between a cheap image and a sensational one. His photographs keep us looking.