Weegee the Famous: The Master of Down-and-Dirty Street Photography
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By Sarah Boxer
FLASH
The Making of Weegee the Famous
By Christopher Bonanos
Illustrated. 379 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $32.
The Making of Weegee the Famous
By Christopher Bonanos
Illustrated. 379 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $32.
To write a concise history of the showboating, hard-boiled photographer known as Weegee, you’d do well to follow the advice of Christopher Bonanos, the author of “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous.” Keep your eye on the evolution of the photographer’s name, for that is the story of Weegee.
He was born in the Eastern European town of Zolochev (in what is now Ukraine) in 1899 as Usher Felig. When his family got to Ellis Island, Usher Felig became Arthur Fellig (aged 10). It was under this name that as a teenager he found his beloved profession, when a street photographer made a portrait of him. Fellig was transfixed by the camera, the plate, the processing and the picture of himself. After that, Bonanos writes, “he never wanted to do anything else.”
At age 14 he quit school and soon began working freelance for various New York newspapers and news agencies (especially Acme) while taking on odd jobs. One involved taking pictures of coffins for a catalog; another involved squeegeeing photographic prints for The New York Times. In fact, some think the name Weegee is a shortening of Squeegee Boy, although the better-known story, promoted by Weegee, is that he had a supernatural ability, like a Ouija board, to forecast a decisive photographic moment.
Fellig’s earliest street photography career was aided by a pony he’d bought and named Hypo, after the chemical solution used to process pictures. Here’s how Fellig would get a sale: “We’d find a kid, put him on the pony, take the picture and then try to peddle it to the kid’s mother, 5 cents a print.” The trick to the game was washing the child’s face, and, as Bonanos puts it, getting “a picture that even a poor family couldn’t resist.” The process, from pony to picture, was jokingly called “kidnapping.”
Hypo didn’t earn his keep, however, and Fellig moved on to news photography. Eventually he managed to break away from the pack of anonymous scrappy news photographers to become Weegee, the man with a knack for getting to murders, fires, suicides and crashes at exactly the right moment. How? His main advantages were living right down the street from Police Headquarters on Centre Street and not having a steady job or family (because he never wanted, as he said, “a hot dinner, a husky kid”), which meant he could stay up all night chasing crime, fires, accidents and women. (Most fires, he noted, would happen at 1 or 2 a.m. “Five o’clock is the jumping time — people are out of liquor.”)
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Of course, there was more to it than that. Weegee had a gift for telling a great story, then stretching it into an even better story, often starring himself. At every crucial turn in his career, Bonanos argues, Weegee was working just as hard at his own image as at his craft. Once, in 1936, he photographed a murdered man whose body had been stuffed in a steamer trunk — a sight too gruesome for most newspapers. Fellig’s shot, made at night with his box camera, flash and shutter release cord, was funny; it showed him peering into the trunk. Here, the subject wasn’t the body but the audience’s reaction to it. And, in this case, the audience was the photographer. Yes, Weegee wasn’t only a showboat but a man with an eye for black humor.
Many of Weegee’s iconic shots — guilty bodies, distraught bodies, naked bodies, curious bodies, sleeping bodies, bodies watching movies, crowds of bodies, mostly from the late 1930s and early 1940s — focus on spectators. For instance, in October 1941, a small-time gambler was shot at night near a schoolyard. In addition to photographing the body, Weegee shot the crowd of children pushing one another to see the dead man. This photograph is, as Bonanos observes, an amazing catalog of human emotion, from agony to glee. The biggest star is a girl whose face registers insane excitement and curiosity. Weegee titled it “Their First Murder.” Did I mention he had a gift for words?
In the mid-1940s Weegee added to his repertoire — documenting not only low life but bohemian life (at Sammy’s Bowery Follies) and high life, too. Many of these pictures involve what Bonanos terms “the New York observer, observed.” In 1943, at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera, Weegee photographed two dowagers in white furs and jewels smiling grimly at the camera, while on the darkened sideline a woman in a dirty coat and stole assesses them. Without the frump and without Weegee’s brilliant title, “The Critic,” this wouldn’t be a Weegee. So it’s no shock that once he got famous, Weegee was occasionally accused of “stocking the pond,” which meant, in this case, bringing his own frump. (By the way, she looks very much like one of Weegee’s cross-dressing friends.)
In 1940 Weegee became one of the founding photographers at PM, a new liberal paper devoted to telling stories with photographs. There the editors weren’t interested just in Weegee’s photographs but also in his wiseass persona, his bug-eyed face, his huge Speed Graphic camera, his car trunk stuffed with equipment, his nocturnal habits, his slovenly ways and his tall tales. He became a champ at producing “tick-tocks” — first-person stories, told with pictures and words.
The turning point in Weegee’s career — and, some say, the tragedy of it — was having his work exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-1940s. He began thinking of himself as an artist. He took to calling himself “Weegee the Famous” and stamped his photos thus. He learned how to distort photographs. He got married. He gave up his digs near Police Headquarters. He produced art books, starting with “Naked City.” And he was called to Hollywood. Weegee the Famous became a caricature of himself. In the late 1940s and 1950s he often played the part of a hard-boiled photographer doing tough-guy stuff in Hollywood movies. And by the 1960s, he was acting in schlocky girlie movies in New York and England, portraying his own lust. In a British film called “My Bare Lady,” Weegee played the part of a nude popeyed judge in a nudist beauty contest.
Weegee did, however, have a last hurrah in the 1960s. Stanley Kubrick knew Weegee (they were both press photographers in the 1940s) and hired him to take stills during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.” In the end, Weegee left two marks on the movie. First, Peter Sellers, who was fascinated with Weegee, borrowed his high-pitched voice for the character of Dr. Strangelove. And second, if not for Weegee’s stills, we wouldn’t know that “‘Dr. Strangelove’ was meant to end with an enormous slapstick pie fight in the War Room,” as Bonanos notes. “Kubrick later decided that it was too glib a finale for a story about nuclear annihilation, and he rewrote and reshot the ending.” But Weegee had already caught some unbelievable shots of himself, Kubrick and Sellers covered in custard. Who knew?
Because Weegee was inseparable from his work, this biography is mostly a photograph-by-photograph tour (Bonanos, the city editor at New York magazine, is also the author of “Instant: The Story of Polaroid”); sadly, though, some of the photographs discussed aren’t reproduced in the book. What comes through about Weegee is that he was ambitious, original, energetic, inventive, egalitarian (except when it came to women) and witty. Other than that, he’s a shell. Weegee’s life story is basically “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” As Fellig became Weegee, the real man vanished. Eventually Weegee couldn’t keep up with his name and wanted to go back: “My real name is Arthur Fellig. … I created this monster, Weegee, and I can’t get rid of it.” At age 69 he died of a brain tumor. Tellingly, one of the book’s most poignant moments comes after he dies, when the photographer Diane Arbus knocks on the door of Weegee’s friend Wilma Wilcox and finds herself ankle-deep in 8,000 prints, diving in to save the best. The sight of Arbus wading through these images would have made, I think, a great Weegee picture.
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