‘Flash’: Snapshot of photographer
Weegee became famous with iconic images
It’s easy to feel conflicted about-“Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” by Christopher Bonanos (Henry Holt, 319 pp., ★★★☆). It’s a biography that stirs up so many feelings: curiosity, fascination, revulsion, pathos, empathy and not a few moral questions.
That, it’s clear, was the nature of Weegee. He was a product of his time, a hustling, rumpled, crumpled, cigarchomping news photographer who managed to be in the right place so quickly and so often that he happily promoted the idea that he was, in effect, a living, breathing Ouija board.
But what do we make of Usher Fellig (1899-1968), “a hungry shtetl child from Eastern Europe” who spoke no English when he landed in New York in 1909, Americanized his name from Usher to Arthur soon after arrival, and used a combination of moxie, skill, relentless self-promotion and manipulation to become Weegee the Famous, a character he invented and did his best to inhabit?
“He seemed like a kind of person you didn’t want to know,” said one noteworthy actress and playwright, who, as the author points out, still ended up calling Weegee, “my good friend Arthur.”
Weegee is known to most, if not all of us, whether we know it or not.
His iconic images, particularly those shot in the 1930s and ’ 40s, are embedded somewhere deep in our collective consciousness. We recognize them: harshly lit Speed Graphic black-and-whites of slain gangsters on the streets of New York; raging fires; car crashes; perp walks and crazy killers; the crowds at Coney Island; kids sleeping on fire escapes on hot summer nights; high-society types on their way to the opera. These are cultural reference points, though so many years after the fact, their origin seems blurred somewhere between movie fantasy and reality.
Which is about right. Because, as “Flash” makes clear, not everything was quite as it appeared in Weegee’s world.
The photographer, whose work rose to Museum of Modern Art stature, wrote the captions for many of his photographs and also frequently found conveniently or perfectly placed street signs during spot news assignments to do the work for him. And if the body, sign or situation needed a little push, well…
Bonanos, an editor at New York magazine (and author of “Instant: The Story of Polaroid”), makes few judgments beyond the ones that demand to be called out, mostly around Weegee’s unsettling attitudes concerning women and on-site rearranging and prefabrication of events to heighten the dramatic effects of his work.
But even taking into account all the leering, crass, self-aggrandizing moments, there’s no denying the artist’s eye, the innovator’s inspiration and the observer’s shared humanity that inhabits so much of Weegee’s work. It’s there whether he was capturing the agony of loss in the aftermath of a Brooklyn tenement fire or the garish glitter of a backstage scene at a Los Angeles strip club.
Bonanos also weaves a thread of Weegee as Zelig through the biography that adds yet another layer of oddity and the unexpected to the ultimately sad ending to Weegee’s life.
“My real name is Arthur Fellig,” the photographer said near the end. “But I don’t even recognize it when I see it. I created this monster, Weegee, and I can’t get rid of it.”
“Flash” strongly suggests there will always be reasons to look to the innovator’s inspiring and dramatic work, even if it’s uncomfortable to view the man.