The photographs of Arthur Fellig,
still enthrall like timeless, hardboiled detective stories -- 70 or so years after they were taken.
A glimpse of Weegee's seedy, fast-paced universe is on view at the
this month. The 21 familiar images of squalid New York City nightlife taken during the 1930s and '40s -- from cramped tenement dwellers to the bloodied body of a murdered man on a sidewalk -- are featured in this modest showcase of Weegee's pulpy glee and humanity. They also tell us that the wee hours milieu captured on film decades ago still blooms right here in post-Millennial Portland.
Even if you've never heard of Weegee, you've likely seen his work or the work of those he helped inspire. (Film director and former Look magazine photographer
was one of many fervent Weegee admirers, and his early films were deeply influenced by the photographer.)
The White Box show, taken from the collection of Alan and Ellen Newberg in Bremerton, Wash., and jointly assembled by the gallery's coordinator, Elizabeth Lamb, and the Eugene university's director of architecture and allied arts in Portland, Kate Wagle, brings out Weegee's familiar cast of night denizens. Each one is part of an unfinished little story.
There's a man and woman lying on the street, for instance, partially propped up by pillows after some kind of traumatic accident. Gawkers hover above and around them with both fascination and concern.
There's the little person hanging out in a bar. For some reason he's wearing diapers. Like most Weegee photographs, context is minimal, which is as it should be. The less we know the more we want to know about the world within the picture.
There's a couple kissing madly in a movie theater; maybe they're putting on a show for the camera, or maybe Weegee just happened to be there at the right moment. Maybe it's both.
Then there are the four kids sleeping on the fire escape of a tenement, a little brood cramped for comfort. It's not clear what time of year it is out on the steely tenement rails. One of the children cradles a cat.
On one level, these photos are sharp dissections of New York City during the Great Depression and the age of American industrialism. One could interpret the photos of tenement conditions as documents arguing for social reform; and similarly, Weegee's photos of drag queens, homeless people and other dwellers of the underworld can be seen as an attempt to better understand those living on the fringes of society. Weegee wanted to cast these so-called outsiders in plain, human light.
But Weegee was also attracted to the lurid melodrama of the streets -- murder, mayhem, crime, action. Who knows what happened to the poor chap sprawled face-down on the street, a bloody gunshot near the eye, a pistol several feet away.
But Weegee was there, both as reporter and voyeur, documenting and satiating our collective fascination with the gruesome tabloid events we feel obliged to push away out of courtesy and good manner. Often enough, we succumb to impulse, desire.
In his 2006 review of a show at the International Center for Photography, New York Times critic Holland Cotter called Weegee the photographer "who first made night a symbol, an existential condition."
Indeed, Weegee was among the first photographer poets of the night, capturing the things that happen during those dark hours when the rest of us are asleep, safely at home in our beds. Or should be.
To maneuver through the night quickly -- and to arrive at crime scenes before other reporters -- Weegee crafted a peculiar little life and persona, and he did it carefully, says Julia Dolan, the Portland Art Museum's photography curator and a Weegee fan.
Weegee was one of the first reporters to carry a radio to catch police calls. He had a portable darkroom installed in his car in order to expedite pictures. He was singularly driven. He was also a loner.
An Austrian immigrant, Weegee was raised in the areas he photographed. He was a Jew. He lived on the social fringes, like the people he photographed, but was also the voyeur looking at that world from the outside.
Ultimately, the neighborhoods photographed by Weegee have been cleared of much of its grit. As for Weegee, fame and celebrity eventually touched his life, polished the lurid details and fringes into something shinier. At one point, Weegee even moved to Hollywood to make movies. Some, including Dolan, say that's when Weegee's work began to lose its "underdog's view of the world."
But this show is less concerned with Weegee's biography. Instead, it looks at Weegee's work through a single viewfinder that exceeds time and geography; from New York in the '30s and '40s to Portland in the present day, they still bewitch and resonate.
Curator Lamb says she and Wagle chose works that might remind people that the asphalt jungle of Weegee's New York can be found here in Portland, specifically in Old Town, where the White Box gallery is located.
On Northwest Couch Street, crime, mayhem, street walkers and homeless people are defining characteristics of life in a part of town that has been on the cusp of extraordinary change.
Weegee's photos and life instruct us that, soon enough, another generation will take over, and the outsiders and fringe-dwellers will move on or disappear entirely.
-- D.K. Row