Final analysis
Murder At The Feast by Weegee, 22nd September 1939
Iremember reading somewhere when I was young and impressionable that if a picture needs a caption it isn’t doing its job properly. I’m not entirely keen on those sort of hard-nosed and uncompromising absolutes that come from the narrow-minded 20-press-ups-before-breakfast school of photography. Still, I think we’d all agree there is a good deal of value in aiming to get everything that needs to be said actually in the picture rather than on the wall next to it. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words (whose words though – they vary) it might seem excessive to garnish it with even more. That’s like ordering chips with a side of fries.
Our cigar-chomping friend from New York, Ascher Fellig – or Weegee as he was known – knew a thing or two about how to tell a story in a single frame. He was a master of creating pictures that needed no captions at all but which would inevitably be given a caption by some poor newspaper sub-editor working the night shift.
In this picture there is a man on the floor. The hole in his head facing the lens tells us immediately that not only is he dead but that he was shot to make him that way. The presence of the police suggests this is a crime scene, so probably the man didn’t make the hole himself. There’s a crowd, and the bunting at the top of the frame explains that there was some sort of party going on. I don’t know a lot about American policemen but they definitely look NYPD, and the dead man looks like one of the Italians we see in old gangster movies.
We can garner all that information from what’s in the picture even though it was taken over 80 years ago.
Weegee tells us all this with his composition, his understanding of the situation and his experienced eye. He hasn’t just photographed the dead man to make a blank factual record the context of which would need explaining, but has aimed his camera upwards to include the policemen, the bunting and the crowd. He has made a mental list of all the things that need to be in the frame – probably in a fraction of a second without really thinking about it – and has made sure he is showing us all the clues we need.
Little Italy clues
I don’t want to judge the policeman in the foreground but he doesn’t look too heartbroken about the loss. He’s not too bothered about Joseph ‘Little Joe’ La Cava who’s lying on the sidewalk outside 119 Mulberry Street, in Little Italy, with his arms spread out as if he were martyred on the cross. Little Joe was a protection man and got killed while trying to extort money from a local café owner. The locals would have known him and what he was up to, as would we have were we around when it was taken. We would also have known it was mid-September and that the folks from Naples celebrate their patron saint from the old country during the Feast of San Gennaro (Saint Januarius) – and that there were often inter-gang problems. Those last clues might be a bit cold now, but were we living in New York in the 1930s the situation would have been as clear as day.
We don’t need to go around shooting gangsters for practice, but we could do worse than to allow Weegee into our head every now and then to perform a little exercise while we are preparing to take our pictures. As we view the scene that we intend to photograph we could try licking the point of a pencil and writing a caption in our head to explain what’s going on in front of us. Then we could work out how to include all that information in our picture, gradually crossing-out the related sections of the caption to make it as short as possible – or redundant entirely. This way, perhaps, we can ensure we are making the elements of the scene communicate to the viewer so we need no further assistance from the written word. Following this approach will slow us down at first, but with time it will become second nature. It might be an interesting exercise, and it might even make us better photographers.
Photographer and journalist Damien Demolder has worked in the photographic publishing industry since 1997 and is the former editor of Amateur Photographer. He writes regularly about photography for a number of leading publications and has also been a judge on a number of prestigious international photo competitions. See his website at www.damiendemolder.com.