LG&M index richard grayson. linda marie walker. angus trumble. sarah thomas Introductory essays from the publication "LAWYERS GUNS & MONEY"
"Crime was my Oyster..." The Photographs of Weegee
SARAH THOMAS
Assistant Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photography, Art Gallery of South Australia
'I started to freelance out of Manhattan Police Headquarters... I would arrive at midnight... The police teletype machine would be singing a song of crime and violence: Body floating in East River, DOA (dead on arrival)... New-born baby found alive in ash can... Man at emergency ward at Bellevue Hospital with his pecker stuck in bottle (Hi, Doctor Kinsey!). This was to be my world for the next ten years, my private island, my little niche. Crime was my oyster, and I liked it...' (1)
In his autobiography Weegee portrays himself as one of the fast-talking, tough guys from a popular crime novel. Echoing the hard-boiled prose of writers like Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler, and the heroes of newspaper movies like The Front Page, His Girl Friday or, most famous of all, Citizen Kane, Weegee constructs himself as a mythic figure. The self-proclaimed 'world's greatest photographer' rose to fame in an age which lionised the newspaper trade and those associated with it.
Weegee was born Usher (later Arthur) Fellig in Austria in 1899. He and his Jewish family emigrated to New York in 1909, where they lived on the Lower East Side. After he left school in the eighth grade to help support his parents, Weegee took jobs wherever he could find them: peddling candy at sweatshops or burlesque theatres, collecting dirty dishes at the Automat restaurant, making bootleg gin, playing violin at the silent movies, punching holes in Life Savers, and eventually working as a street photographer posing children on a rented pony called 'Hypo'.
His career as a photojournalist began in earnest when, in about 1924, he joined the staff of Acme Newspictures as a darkroom technician. After some time, he was able to fill in as a news photographer, setting out after dark in search of New York's seedier spectacles - murders, fires, accidents and the like. As legend (and his autobiography) have it, Weegee was so-named after the then fashionable ouija board: 'Somehow, the word spread that I was psychic because I always managed to have my pictures in the hands of the paper before any news of the event was currently known... I've never known a better name or a better photographer'. (2)
Weegee's success depended in part on being able to be the first to provide the papers with photographs of newsworthy events. Rather than possessing a sixth sense, he was fearlessly street-wise, on one occasion making a speedy getaway from a world championship fight in an ambulance rented specially for the occasion. As the vehicle sped away, sirens blazing and lights flashing, Weegee lay on the floor developing his glass negatives. Several years later when he began freelancing, he moved into a room behind Manhattan Police Headquarters and wired it up so that he could pick up police signals on his radio, and hear the fire alarms from the nearby fire station. He was reputedly the first civilian to be allowed a police radio in his car.
Crime was the subject of many of Weegee's most powerful photographs: '...a just-shot gangster, lying in the gutter, well dressed in his dark suit and pearl hat, hot off the griddle, with a priest, who seemed to appear from nowhere, giving him the last rites... just-caught stick-up men, lady burglars, etc. These were the pictures that I took and sold.... Sometimes I even used Rembrandt side lighting, not letting too much blood show. And I made the stiff look real cozy, as if he were taking a short nap'. (3)
But crime was not simply a photogenic subject for Weegee, it was a business, one which he could cost down to the last dollar: 'A check from Life: "Two murders, thirty-five dollars." Life magazine pays $5 a bullet. One stiff had five bullets in him, and the other had two.'(4) Like the perpetrators of the crime, Weegee made a living from shooting. This well-known analogy between the violations of the camera and the gun is captured in a photograph of Weegee with his camera perched on a ledge above a sign for a gunsmith's shop, which takes the form of an oversized hand-gun. Weegee had no qualms about photographing 'gangsters littering up the gutters. To me, it's in the nature of a slum clearance project and I say, "Good riddance!".' (5)
As effective photojournalism, Weegee's photographs defined the world in terms of the 'spectacle'. This is reinforced by the fact that the blood-stained victim is frequently surrounded by a stunned, often motionless, audience. The title of one particular image of a voyeuristic crowd leaning out of apartment windows and balconies to stare at a crime scene emphasises the point - Balcony seats at a murder.
Susan Sontag has noted that 'Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society; as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers)' (6) Weegee saw himself as detective, often boasting of his ability to sniff out crime and solve cases. Indeed, as a regular spectator and recorder of crime, he participated in the sort of surveillance which was also carried out by the police department. In many of his photographs the blinding white light of the magnesium flash startled his subjects, forcing them to respond to his presence. At other times, he used new technologies of surveillance, such as the police radio system, and infra-red film which he used to take surreptitious photographs of figures in a darkened cinema. In an age before surveillance cameras or the ubiquitous 'amateur video', Weegee recorded 'shady' characters and events that often were never intended to see the light of day.
1 Arthur Fellig, "Weegee by Weegee. An Autobiography", Da Capo Press, New York, 1975 (2nd ed.) p.36. (First edition published 1961)
2 ibid., p.34
3 ibid., pp.37 & 45
4 ibid., p.65
5 ibid., p.67
6 Susan Sontag, "On Photography", Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1979, p.178
June 1997