Weegee the quintessential N.Y. fotog
WEEGEE WAS no flash in the pan.
Fifty years after his death, the man born Usher Fellig remains the quintessential New York tabloid photographer.
Weegee captured some of the most iconic shots of New York — classic photos printed in the Daily News and other papers, full of blood and death and life and the city.
They were history caught in a hurry — roughedged, tough-guy art.
Today, those photos from 2-cent newspapers hang in museums. Weegee’s work is debated, analyzed, imitated.
And you can almost hear his garrulous voice snarling, “What took ya so long?”
As explained in Christopher Bonanos’ new biography, “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous,” the photographer wrote his own myth from the start.
He arrived on Ellis Island in 1909 as 10-year-old, fleeing Eastern Europe’s anti-Semitism and speaking no English.
His given name, Usher, wouldn’t do here. He informed his family he was now Arthur. Once the seventh-grade dropout started his photography career he changed his name again: He was now Weegee.
Later, he embellished that to Weegee the Famous.
Of the two versions of his moniker’s origin, he preferred the one that linked him to the Ouija board for appearing at crime scenes so fast it was as if he were psychic.
The second story claimed the name sprung from his first job in newspapers, when he worked in The New York Times darkroom as a lowly assistant — a “squeegee boy” drying prints.
Facts didn’t much matter to him. If you didn’t like them, Weegee could come up with his own.
He started shooting photos as a teenager, posing neighborhood kids on a pony. By his 20s, he was freelancing for all of the city’s papers, covering fires, accidents, perp walks, murders.
He was always there. Even those who don’t know his work likely have an image of him. Imagine the classic newspaper photographer — battered hat, rumpled suit and furiously chewed cigar. Weegee was that man, the original. It was an image he cultivated. Long after other photographers switched to faster, lighter cameras, Weegee continued to lug his boxy old Speed Graphic.
The symbol of newspaper journalism remains immortalized in The News’ logo.
Sure, the image of himself he presented to the world was perfect — but the most important thing for Weegee was results. He always got the shot.
The only journalist with a portable police band radio, he zoomed from one scene to another, then raced back to newsrooms. Speed was everything.
To save time, he rigged the trunk of his car with extra cameras, clothes and gear. It was not, as many believed, a portable darkroom.
Before he had the car, he hit upon a brilliant idea: Weegee figured out how to develop negatives on the subway.
After a World Series game, he gave the conductor a dollar and locked himself in the motorman’s booth
“Of course, I had all my bottles with me, developer and hypo, and I started my own laboratory work, and by the time we reached downtown, I was all through,” he said. “And of course the competition could never figure out how I always got the negatives developed first.”
He loved the gory stuff — gangsters gunned down in the street, corpses stuffed in trunks — and during the ’20s and ’30s, it wasn’t hard to find.
Still, he shot everything. One photo, titled “I Cried When I Took This Picture,” caught the anguished face of a woman who just learned her sister and nephew had died in a tenement fire.
There were also lighter photos that showed a sly sense of humor. Assigned to a photo op for a pro-Nazi politician, he captured the man sitting in a covered wagon and framed the photo so the horse’s rear end took up most of the frame.
Weegee’s title: “McWilliams, Fascist Candidate, Faces His Future Undiscouraged.”
Whether scenes of a crowded Coney Island or infrared snaps of couples necking in moviehouses, his pictures always felt like authentic New York moments.
But were they? Weegee wasn’t above a little fakery, if it made something seem more real. He moved objects in or out of frames — even at crime scenes — and had friends pose as bystanders.
His most famous photo, “The Critic,” features two bejeweled matrons as they sweep into the Metropolitan Opera on opening night as a bedraggled woman stares in