A Weegee Way Station

June 12 being the birthday of Weegee (1899-1968), we thought it might be useful to create a little post that relates him to some of this blog’s customary topics.

First, some short biography on the photographer. There is no brief or straightforward way to tell you his name or birthplace. His first name was Ascher, later changed to Usher, later changed to Arthur. His surname was Fellig. The village he came from was Złoczów (now rendered Zolochiv) in Galicia-Lodomeria, or Austrian Galicia, a region that was annexed from Poland to Austria-Hungary and is now part of Ukraine. (You see what I mean? There is no easy way to say what country he was from). When he was about ten he came to the U.S. The rest of his youth was spent in Brooklyn. As a kid he found work as a photographer’s assistant, and gradually acquired his own equipment. He worked in the lab at UPI (then known as Acme Newspictures) starting in the mid ’20s. A squeegee is one of the tools you use when developing photographic prints. That is one of the theories for his nickname.

The other theory is that it is a riff on Ouija (often pronounced weegee) a reference to the fact that the photographer possessed a seemingly psychic ability to arrive at crime scenes before all other photographers and often even before the police. In 1935, he hung out his shingle as a free-lance news photographer, essentially inventing the job. His magical tool was of course not a Ouija board but a short-wave radio. He listened in to police calls and flew to the crime scenes and began to snap. His beat was mostly the Lower East Side, and those gritty, eerie black and white pix made him famous. Our previous Weegee post was on that topic. We reviewed the exhibition Weegee: Murder is Our Business at the International Center of Photography in 2012.

While Travalanche does have a true crime section, and true crime often intersects with show business, Weegee was also fairly obsessed with a couple of our other customary content areas: Coney Island and the circus. In this way he was a big influence on Diane Arbus, whom we wrote about here. Here are links to a couple of online exhibitions you might enjoy:

Weegee’s Coney Island (Coney Island Museum)

Weegee at the Circus (Boo York City)

In 1945, Weegee published his first book photographs Naked City, which formed the basis of Mark Hellinger’s 1948 film.

Weegee was also an influence on Stanley Kubrick, who also began as photographer, and even contributed photos to Dr. Strangelove, though earlier films like Killer’s Kiss (1956) and The Killing (1956) show the influence even more. Weegee has a cameo in Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949), and Jack Donahue’s The Yellow Cab Man (1950), to which he also contributed pictures. Some of his photos were used in Robert Altman’sThe James Dean Story (1957). He starred in his offbeat art film The “Imp”Probable Mr. Weegee in 1966.

Weegee’s other books included Weegee’s People (1946); and Naked Hollywood (1953). The posthumous Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935-1960 (1982) is a classic. Later there was Weegee’s World (1997), and Unknown Weegee (2006).

Howard Franklin’s 1992 movie The Public Eye starring Joe Pesci was largely inspired by the career of Weegee, as was Dan Gilroy’s 2014 Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.