MURDER! MAYHEM! AND MOMENTS OF BEAUTY
Ryerson exhibition revisits the work of ‘Weegee,’ who transcended the grisly art of tabloid photography
In New York in the 1930s and ’40s, a photographer known as Weegee pioneered the grisly arts of tabloid photography, specializing in pictures of murder’s aftermath. But there was a lot more to his work, now on display in an exhibition at the Ryerson Image Centre called Weegee: Murder Is My
Business.
Weegee, the stage name for Arthur Fellig, an Austrian immigrant who came to America in 1909, made his name with pictures such as Murder (1940): the aftermath of a killing, a stiffening body, a taste for the theatrical with an artfully inserted prop (here, a baby carriage) and the clarifying blast of light his flash would provide.
His work was not for the squeamish, which, no doubt, is why he’s considered the paterfamilias of contemporary tabloid photography. It’s also why he’s famous. Shooting for dailies such as the New York Post, Fellig had little trouble capturing the gruesome workaday details of a city gripped by depression, war, race and class division, and a lurch into the modern world.
What also made him renowned were his efforts to be just that. A proto-brander generations ahead of his time, he would stamp his images with his seal: “Photo by Weegee the famous.”
Once, hired by Life magazine in 1936 to photograph police procedure from arrest to incarceration, he instead produced a photo essay of himself being mug-shot, fingerprinted and jailed. It was an outrageous performance, and Life happily ran the images instead, amplifying the photographer’s ever-increasing fame.
But Fellig’s self-promotional flair wasn’t exclusively self-serving. Contemporary thinkers on his role in the history of photography look back on him as a pioneer of using his medium to promote social justice. He was a member of the Photo League, which included such celebrated social documentarians as Aaron Siskind and Margaret Bourke-White. At Murder Is My Busi
ness, a 1941 exhibition, the context of his work shifted from sensational to starkly critical of the violent ferment of a divided city. He still wasn’t above a little self-promotion: the guest book included “anonymous” comments that said such things as “genius — all of them.”
At heart, Fellig felt deeply for the urban poor — the tenements in which they lived, their mishmash of cultures and languages, the very fact that so many of them had pulled up roots in faraway places to coalesce here, in a thrown-together urban stew. He was, after all, one of them, and his pictures often betray an overt, unvarnished affection for the everyday life outside his window.
In his 1945 book Naked City, Fellig prowled the streets of New York in the wee hours, capturing the lewd, the lascivious, the violent, but also the wondrous — normal people, living their lives in a country finding its feet after the Second World War.
Though it put on full display Fellig’s bread-and-butter work with crime andviolence, it brimmed with a fondness for the city’s unsung millions, making their way day by day.
That affection was maybe on its fullest display in Fellig’s pictures of Coney Island, which, to his mind, was the nearest thing to an urban utopia that he could imagine. He went so far as to make full-colour, impressionistic films of its idyll: families splashing in the waves, children playing in gently lapping surf in the golden light of sunset. Maybe he did it to counterweigh his daily diet of blood and mayhem, but at Coney Island, Fellig appeared to be most himself: observant, humane and exulting in the mid nor joys of the everyday.
Weegee: Murder Is My Business continues at the Ryerson Image Centre to Dec. 13.