Abbott,
Berenice
Adams,
Ansel
Adams,
Robert
Alvarez Bravo
Arbus,
Diane
Atget,
Eugene
Bellocq,
E.J.
Blossfeldt,
Karl
Brandt,
Bill
Brassai
Callahan,
Harry
Cameron, Julia M.
Coburn, Alvin L.
Cunningham,Imogen
DeCarava,
Roy
Doisneau,
Robert
Eggleston,
William
Evans,
Walker
Friedlander,
Lee
Gutmann,
John
Hine,
Lewis
Kertesz,
Andre
Klein,
William
Koudelka,
Josef
Lange,
Dorothea
Lartigue,Jacques H.
Laughlin,Clarence J.
Levitt,
Helen
Mapplethorpe,Robert
Modotti,
Tina
Muybridge,Eadweard
Nadar,
Felix
O'Sullivan,
Timothy
Outerbridge,
Paul
Porter,Eliot
Riis,
Jacob
Rodchenko,Alexander
Salgado,Sebastio
Sherman,
Cindy
Smith,
W. Eugene
Sommer,
Frederick
Steichen,
Edward
Stieglitz,
Alfred
Strand,
Paul
Talbot,William H. Fox
Uelsmann,
Jerry
Weegee
Weston,
Edward
White,
Minor
Winogrand, Garry |
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Weegee
(Arthur Felig)
(1899-1968)
Photojournalism
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Biography: WEEGEE examines the intriguing career of Arthur
Fellig, the news photographer cum photojournalist whose images
of murder, mayhem and other dramatic events appeared regularly
in the New York press during the thirties and forties. Although
stories differ as to how he came to use the name "Weegee,"
the most colorful is based upon his claiming with varying degrees
of seriousness that his "psychic powers" enabled him
to be first at the scene of crimes, fires, accidents and the like.
The name was derived from a phonetic spelling of Ouija, the popular
fortune-telling game. Weegee's career spanned four decades and
both coasts as well as Europe, although he is most celebrated
for his extraordinary photographs of New York and New York characters.
A New York character himself who achieved an albeit limited celebrity
status, Weegee was largely (despite any disclaimers) the inspiration
for the 1992 film The Public Eye, starring Joe Pesci. His influence
as a photographer, direct or indirect, can be traced in the work
of such important artistic heirs as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander,
Larry Clark, Garry Winogrand, Les Krims and Eugene Richards. Always
defying categorization, Weegee has been variously described: as
a populist social critic; as a street photographer who came "as
close to a photojournalist as any photographer ever got to be;"1
as a "primitive pioneer of a new formalism;"2 and as
a mass media photographer, a working professional and master of
the spectacle, who must "be rescued from 'museumization'"
because "museumization" attempts to convert the raw
power and historical importance of his reality-of his photographs
as carriers of significant fact-into art.3 There is clearly discomfort
in the seeming contradiction between the obvious timelessness
and sheer visual appeal of many of his images and their creation
as timely, on-the-spot news shots of the vagaries and extremes
of human behavior, with the circumstances of creation leading
some critics to demand that news pictures must always be contextualized-at
the same time admitting that the best news pictures are those
which need the least explanation. Further, even the damaged condition
of many of Weegee's extant photographs has not mediated against
their inclusion in museum exhibitions and this speaks to the persistence
of his images in the mind's eye rather than to some bizarre perversity
on the part of curators.
Born Usher (Arthur) Fellig in Zloczew, Austria (now Poland) in
1899, Weegee emigrated to America with his family and grew up
in a tenement on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Around 1923, he
joined Acme Newspictures (which later became United Press International
Photos) as a darkroom technician, occasionally filling in as a
news photographer. Later, around 1935, armed with his Speed Graphic
camera and working out of Police Headquarters in lower Manhattan,
he began his career as a freelance press photographer. His images
of dead gangsters and his own flamboyant personality established
his reputation as New York's resident "crime photographer,"
a reputation and persona he nurtured to the point of ultimately
stamping the backs of his pictures, "Credit Photo by Weegee
the Famous." His territory expanded from the Bowery to Greenwich
Village to the activities of the uptown social elite and his clients
included such periodicals as Life, Look and Vogue as well as the
"legitimate" newspapers, the daily tabloids and everything
in between. Among the most supportive of his clients was PM Daily,
founded in 1940. Weegee worked with them until 1945, when he began
a short stint as a society photographer for Vogue. From around
1947 to 1951, Weegee worked periodically in Hollywood, serving
as a technical consultant and playing cameo parts in several motion
pictures. Between 1948 and 1967, he made several films himself,
both in black and white and in color, using varying locales, from
New York to Hollywood to Europe. He also served as an advisor
on special effects to Stanley Kubrick for Kubrick's now classic
1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned
to Love the Bomb. Weegee's popular book about New York, Naked
City, published in 1945, inspired the Hollywood film noir, The
Naked City, although he was apparently not directly involved in
the production. He authored a number of publications following
Naked City, including Weegee's People (1946), Naked Hollywood
(1953) and Weegee by Weegee, An Autobiography (1961), all of which,
rather than being taken entirely literally, need to be read as
part of Weegee's lively attempt to create and re-create his own
self-image.
The dramatic close-ups, brightly-lit shots of spectators, cropping
variants and tonal contrasts of Weegee's early work derive from
his extraordinary flair for telling a story with directness and
immediacy over and above the general stylistic conventions demanded
by the dictates of newspaper production. In contrast to most other
news photographers, he consistently and intentionally blurred
the dividing line between being a participant in the action and
spectator to it. His use of visual puns and his wise-cracking
captions for many of his images evidence his intrusion into his
subject matter, an arch commingling of his life and his art. Although
he had some interest in exploiting the technical aspects of his
medium throughout his career, his most involved technical experimentation
came in the early- to mid-fifties when he began devoting himself
almost full time to producing optical distortions. To create these
images, which have often been criticized rather harshly, he used
everything from mirrors to kaleidoscopes and specially designed
lenses and filters, presaging the interest in manipulated photography
that would develop two decades later during the seventies. Weegee's
distortions ranged from rather Daumier-like, reportorial caricatures
to kaleidoscopic pinwheels with subjects as varied as helicopters
and London street minstrels. Their existence has led many of Weegee's
admirers to postulate a "good" Weegee and a "bad"
Weegee, the latter being the press photographer gone astray in
attempting to turn himself into an artist. Although never given
significant attention by museums during his lifetime, Weegee did
come to the attention of both Beaumont Newhall and Edward Steichen
at The Museum of Modern Art, where he was included in such shows
as Action Photography (1943) and 50 Photographs by 50 Photographers
(1948). The Photo League in New York gave him a one-person exhibition
as early as 1941, Weegee: Murder Is My Business. In 1960 and 1962,
he had one-person shows at the Photokino in Cologne, Germany,
and following his death in 1968, his photographs were shown at
the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona (1975)
and the International Center of Photography in New York City (1977),
both of which maintain important archives of his work. The photographer
Diane Arbus did the preliminary research for The Museum of Modern
Art's 1973 exhibition From the Picture Press that included several
Weegee images, one of which was used for the cover and end papers
of the show's catalogue. A decade ago, in 1984, Weegee's work
was once again the subject of a one-person exhibition, at the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Diana L. Johnson, Brown
University)
More on Weegee (Arthur Felig):
The
Photography of Arthur Felig - Brown University
Extensive Examples of Felig's work, Including an Exhaustive Biography.
Weegee's
World
Large Site, Dedicated to the Work of Weegee.
Side
Photographic Gallery
43 images from a UK collection of Weegee's work donated by his
widow Wilma Wilcox
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