{"id":126125,"date":"2018-06-05T11:00:05","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T15:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126125"},"modified":"2018-06-05T17:24:18","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T21:24:18","slug":"the-man-behind-the-weegee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/05\/the-man-behind-the-weegee\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Behind the Weegee"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mannequins: Weegee with friends in a promotional store-window display at the L.A. Camera Exchange, 1951.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about that name first. Or rather, those three names.<\/p>\n

Usher Fellig was a greenhorn, a hungry shtetl child from eastern Europe who spoke no English. When he came through Ellis Island in 1909, at ten years old, he reinvented himself, as so many immigrants do. In his first years in New York, Usher became Arthur, a Lower East Side street kid who was eager to get out of what he called \u201cthe lousy tenements,\u201d earn a living, impress girls, make a splash. He had turned his name (slightly) less Jewish and his identity (somewhat) more American, as much as he could make it. As a young man, he was shy, awkward, broke, and unpolished, and at fourteen, he became a seventh-grade dropout. He was also smart, ambitious, funny, and (as he and then his fellow New Yorkers and eventually the world discovered) enormously expressive when you put a camera in his hands.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As an adult, he reinvented himself a second time. \u201cIn 1925,\u201d his friend Peter Martin later writes, \u201cArthur Fellig disappeared through a hole in space, and nobody ever heard of him again.\u201d In real life, it was a little more gradual than that, but in his place there began to appear a character called Weegee, a persona Arthur Fellig eventually slipped into as easily as he did his ill-maintained, loose-fitting suits. \u201cWeegee the Famous,\u201d he signed his name, introducing himself to strangers and talk-show hosts as \u201cthe world\u2019s greatest living photographer.\u201d Weegee worked New York City by night and was a man who knew how to take hold of a tough town, snapping pictures of gangsters and movie stars, selling prints to newspapers and magazines and the Museum of Modern Art, consulting on Hollywood movies, jetting off to London or Paris on assignment. In the role of Weegee, Arthur Fellig was able to shed his awkwardness. He was brash, working the angles with cops, talking up his \u201cgenius\u201d with interviewers. He could spin off polished wisecracky anecdotes rat-a-tat while delivering four-hour impromptu lectures on the craft of news photography to anyone who\u2019d have him, lingering until the last member of the audience had grown tired of asking questions. He explicitly said, later on, that as a young man, \u201cI wanted to go out and make a lot of money, become famous, and meet people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Fellig and Weegee could make a raw first impression. Sixty-two years after meeting him, the actress and playwright Judith Malina remembers that at first, \u201che seemed like a kind of person you didn\u2019t want to know.\u201d Yet somehow, she explains, soon enough, he\u2019d have you charmed. Malina certainly was; she eventually agreed to pose nude for him and spoke of him warmly, calling him \u201cmy good friend Arthur.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The factory made bouillon cubes; the sign made its own caption. This perfect mix of billboard and blaze occurred on Water Street, next to the Brooklyn Bridge, on December 18, 1943<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Most of us have an image in our heads of the big-city newspaper photographer at midcentury: the squat guy in a rumpled suit and crumpled fedora, carrying a big press camera with a flashgun mounted on its side, a stinky cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. Central Casting deserves only a little of the credit. Weegee is the man who created that image, and it has outlived his mainstream fame. People who have never heard of Weegee can describe him. He not only took hold of his life and redefined it; the image he created of himself lingers, fifty years after his death, to the point where he has become an archetype as much as a person. \u201cHe rather likes to pass himself off as a character,\u201d writes John Lewis, an editor at the newspaper PM<\/em>, where Weegee did some of his best work. \u201cHe is, but not exactly the same one.\u201d The public-facing persona furthered his career, but it was the one within who framed the shots and pressed the shutter button.<\/p>\n

The man himself was real, and as an individual maker of pictures, he was both innately talented and profoundly skilled. But we will never quite know if he was merely first among equals. News photography during the early part of Weegee\u2019s career was almost always anonymous. When credits did appear, most of the time, they attached pictures not to people but to institutional entities: the Associated Press, International News Service, ACME Newspictures. Besides, in the thirties, virtually no one thought this stuff was art. It was made on demand for the next day\u2019s edition, and if it wasn\u2019t quite a disposable commodity, it was pretty close. Spot news, it was called, and even the work of a good photographer would be filed the next day in the paper\u2019s morgue, kept on hand in case the subject reappeared in the news. Unless it depicted something of ageless, recurring interest (the burning Hindenburg<\/em>, say, or Babe Ruth as he put a home-run ball in the seats), a picture might not be reprinted for five years or fifty. Most often, it would never be seen again. A lot of news pictures eventually got thrown away.<\/p>\n

Even when press photographers were celebrated, they weren\u2019t invited to the party. In 1935, The American Mercury<\/em> magazine joined with the book publisher Alfred A. Knopf to publish a big anthology of great news pictures titled The Breathless Moment<\/em>. In its roughly two hundred pages, not one photographer is named, and the introduction doesn\u2019t bother to apologize or explain. That\u2019s just how it was. Arthur Fellig\u2019s work was anonymous, too, until Weegee decided that it shouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A classic from 1936, made on the sidewalk in front of 90 Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. \u201cI made the stiff look real cozy, as if he were taking a short nap.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

He became Weegee the Famous because, beyond a doubt, his photography rose to a high level. His best pictures are intensely truthful. Some are painful, others unexpectedly warm, many others funny, touching, memorable. (And as we shall see, sometimes he would give the truth some extra help.) But we also know Weegee because he was aggressive about letting people know who made those pictures. He was a constant, cheery self-promoter. This set him apart from his more diffident, now forgotten colleagues. An afternoon spent browsing their work in the New York Daily News<\/em> or the Los Angeles Examiner<\/em> will yield a few photos that hold their own next to Weegee\u2019s best. In the newspapers\u2019 file drawers, some of the prints will have the photographers\u2019 names scribbled on their backs. Others, poignantly, have surnames only (\u201cPetersen\u201d or \u201cLevine\u201d or \u201cMcCrory\u201d), with first names forgotten by all but their grandchildren. Many other pictures carry no name at all. Were any of those men\u2014there were virtually no women\u2014consistent enough, reliable enough, aggressive enough to produce deadline art the way Arthur Fellig could? It takes nothing away from his achievements to say that some of them probably were. We\u2019ll never know. Weegee the Famous has come to stand for them all.<\/p>\n

And that word itself, Weegee<\/em>? It may have been meant to obscure, yet its origins say a great deal about Arthur Fellig. To hear him tell it, he was a photographic clairvoyant, someone who got a mysterious tingle in his elbow when news was about to break and who made his way to the scene just in time. Eventually, someone\u2014in all the retellings, the source varied, from Fellig himself to a friend to a secretary at the photo agency where he worked\u2014said something like, \u201cIt\u2019s as if you have a Ouija board.\u201d That fortune-telling gadget was a national craze of the twenties, and the self-educated Arthur Fellig spelled it the way it sounded: \u201coui-jee\u201d came out \u201cWeegee.\u201d Or, as he later wisecracked, \u201cI changed it \u2026 to make it easier for the fan mail.\u201d A variant of this tale refers to the line drawing of a moon face that appears in the corner of the Ouija board itself. Charles Liotta, a photoengraver who worked alongside Arthur Fellig at the start of his career, told people that he had seen an echo of Fellig\u2019s doughy, expressive mug in that face and given him the nickname. Perhaps he did.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s another story. In his twenties, before he was selling his own pictures, Fellig worked in the darkrooms of the New York Times<\/em>. His particular role on that fast-moving assembly line was to dry off prints before they were pressed onto ferrotype plates for final finishing. Much as reporters would pull a page out of their typewriters and shout, Copy!, whereupon a copyboy would whisk the story off to be typeset, a darkroom printer would announce that a photo was ready to be dried by calling out, Squeegee! The young men who responded were called squeegee boys. (Fellig was not the only such apprentice who made good; Frank Cancellare, the photographer whose DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN<\/small> picture everyone has seen, also started out as a squeegee boy.) When Fellig took another job, at the ACME Newspictures agency, he moved up to printing photos himself, and when his colleagues found out that he had until recently been a squeegee boy, they needled him about it. Over time, as he gained their respect and as his technical skills became evident, the mockery flipped into praise. \u201cSqueegee boy\u201d turned into \u201cMr. Squeegee\u201d and eventually became \u201cWeegee.\u201d \u201cLike practically everything he ever owned,\u201d a friend of his once joked, \u201cthe name got worn down.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Weegee’s friends suspected that he moved the body to appear in front of the sign on the mailbox, but the evidence leans toward its being an honest photo. Made on December 19, 1940.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

So: either Arthur Fellig was a near-clairvoyant artisan turned artist with magical powers or he was a schlub in the darkroom, barked at and hazed by his colleagues. If the first story is the true one, he was very, very good at creating a public image. If the second version is true (as indeed it is), that achievement grows even more impressive: he was able to turn a vaguely humiliating nickname into what we now would call a personal brand, one that has endured for nearly a hundred years. His was a compartmentalized soul. He was sensitive enough to catch extreme delicacy on film but also steely enough to do so when faced with a severed human head or the incinerated victim of a truck fire. He was an uneducated man whose writing displays vigorous, confident wit and flair; a person who was strikingly egalitarian on matters of race while reveling in his misogyny; a great American artist who didn\u2019t quite have a grip on what an artist was. He is generally thought of as a photographer of crime and urban mayhem, yet the majority of his working life was spent on other subjects. He was, like most photographers, a voyeur. Maybe more than most.<\/p>\n

Among the art establishment, he was respected but also the object of condescension. Too often they called him \u201ca primitive,\u201d implying that his skill came without practice or craft. They took pains to point out his relatively crude lighting, his unsubtle extra-high-contrast prints. Most observers thought\u2014and some critics still do\u2014that Weegee made great art only when he wasn\u2019t really trying to, and that when he did try later in life the results were a sad joke. (They\u2019re not.) But he, in turn, saw things that they didn\u2019t. Next to the work of many of his ostensibly more artistic contemporaries, Weegee\u2019s is more vivid, more powerful, sui generis. He very early on grasped that the distinction between high culture and low was growing blurry, and he enthusiastically jumped back and forth between those worlds. He realized that pictures of a workaday news event such as a fire are often less interesting than pictures of people reacting to that event, and many of his greatest photographs show the latter. In a lot of ways\u2014his self-referentiality, his acknowledgment of the viewer, his cheerfully held attitude that a news photograph need not be 100 percent factual to be entirely truthful\u2014he was postmodern before we had that word.<\/p>\n

Many of us, in various fields of work, create professional fa\u00e7ades for ourselves. A messy home life, with troubled kids or even just piled-up dishes in the sink, fades to invisibility if you show up at the office in a suit on Monday morning. A shy person, girded with the journalistic armor of a camera or reporter\u2019s notebook, can abruptly become capable of pushing past a police line to ask tough questions. Celebrities reinvent themselves for public view, and we revel in their transformations. Who doesn\u2019t enjoy those \u201cBefore They Were Famous\u201d photos that gossip magazines occasionally run? We look at them to laugh at the awkward hair and cheesy fashion choices, but also to see whether people destined for extraordinary lives knew it all along. (Did they show their drive, or at least their cheekbones, from the beginning?) Today, one can construct fame out of virtually nothing. On social media, we build representations of our lives that resemble but do not truly reflect our days. \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live,\u201d Joan Didion so memorably wrote; we also tell everyone else our own stories, and eventually they can become our biographical plotlines, to be debunked, perhaps, only much later.<\/p>\n

Arthur Fellig, as Weegee, was in the business of grabbing images that functioned as little one-act plays, both comedy and drama. They were the silver halide equivalent of that six-word novel spuriously attributed to Ernest Hemingway: \u201cFor sale: Baby shoes, never worn.\u201d Fellig communicated in a visual language that both tabloid-reading subway commuters and arty museum curators grasped right away. You can\u2019t say the best narrative he ever fashioned was his own\u2014he made too many great photographs that tell vivid stories about other people\u2014but Weegee himself was certainly the beat he sustained longest. In the archive of his work (preserved by his longtime companion Wilma Wilcox, and today held by the International Center of Photography) there are about nineteen thousand prints. Hundreds of them show Weegee himself, a mix of self-portraits and photographs by unnamed friends and colleagues. He was obsessed with his own public face.<\/p>\n

Which makes sense: that image enabled the making of the other images. Weegee was the one who went on talk shows, raced to a burning tenement to beat the competition, got assignments that paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars; Arthur Fellig did not. Was that guy he created immodest? Self-aggrandizing? Pushy? Irritating, sometimes? You bet he was. This was New York, and he was in the newspaper business. Modesty was for suckers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

On a hot weekend in July 1940, the head count on the beach at Coney Island approached one million.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Christopher Bonanos\u00a0is city editor at\u00a0<\/em>New York\u00a0magazine, where he covers arts and culture and urban affairs. He is the author of<\/em>\u00a0Instant: The Story of Polaroid. He lives in New York City with his wife and their son.<\/em><\/p>\n

From the book<\/em>\u00a0FLASH: The Making of Weegee the Famous\u00a0by Christopher Bonanos. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Christopher Bonanos. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Let\u2019s talk about that name first. Or rather, those three names. Usher Fellig was a greenhorn, a hungry shtetl child from eastern Europe who spoke no English. When he came through Ellis Island in 1909, at ten years old, he reinvented himself, as so many immigrants do. In his first years in New York, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[30881,34306,1757,3231,34305,34303,6648,34304],"class_list":["post-126125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-babe-ruth","tag-judith-malina","tag-lower-east-side","tag-museum-of-modern-art","tag-peter-martin","tag-usher-fellig","tag-weegee","tag-weegee-the-famous"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Man Behind the Weegee<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Arthur Fellig was able to turn a vaguely humiliating nickname into what we now would call a personal brand, one that has endured for nearly a hundred years.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/05\/the-man-behind-the-weegee\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Man Behind the Weegee by Christopher Bonanos\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 5, 2018 \u2013   Let\u2019s talk about that name first. 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