The cigar-chomping P.T. Barnum of photography, Arthur Fellig was a photographic opportunist who mixed fantasy with reality. A self-aggrandizing showboat who understood what sold, he prowled the nighttime streets of New York City getting the people what they wanted: murder, fires, car crashes and socialites. And he did it by any means necessary — paying off cops, moving bodies and staging scenes to look authentic. The gritty, shadowy streets he captured came to define the urban jungle of Manhattan that Hollywood imagined onto celluloid.
It was his mystical ability to be first on the scene that earned him the nick-name of Weegee — a phonetic bastardization the Ouija Board. On the obscure LP "Famous Photographers Tell How," released in 1958, Weegee speaks of clawing his way up the ranks of news photography. Half rose-tinted boasting, half instructional for aspiring snappers, his thick accent relates time spent hanging around Manhattan Police Headquarters waiting for the teletype to rattle off the evening's subjects. His operation would grow more sophisticated to include police scanners next to his bed, the trunk of his car for developing film and a typewriter for writing captions.
His advice mirrors the contradictions evident throughout his photographic archive. "The easiest kind of a job to cover was a murder. The stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn't get up and walk away or get temperamental." This casual street slang and gallows humor is indicative of one facet of Weegee's career. Taking advantage of the time a body remains at the scene he could arrange shots that carried a punch-line. In a 1942 photograph above, we watch as policemen cover the victim of a car accident with discarded newspapers. Behind and above the gathered crowd of morbid curiosity seekers is a theater marquee advertising the night's double-feature -- Joy of Living. An over-exposed face cranes his neck to be in on the joke.
Cheap shots were easy sales, but Weegee claims to have fought for humanism. Covering a tenement fire in Harlem we see not the flames and embers or firefighters battling a blaze. Two women, a mother and daughter, stare grief-stricken into the night. Gripping one another, anguished tears threatening to fall, they are helpless as another daughter and her baby remain trapped on the top floor. "To me that symbolized the lousy tenements, everything else that went with them," says Weegee. For all his manipulation, this image feels authentic. In the end, some may feel betrayed by his meddling, but the drama of his work is still impressive and widely influential.
In later years Weegee was a celebrity photographer who dabbled in distorted images and flirted with Hollywood fame. He was what would later be called a paparazzo. He published books, both collections and autobiographical, and gave lectures. His status as a photographic pioneer is both irrefutable and problematic, and this nine minutes laid on wax provide a little additional insight into the complex issue of what is real in photography.
*Thanks to Boogie Woogie Flu for posting this excellent audio gem. *