The flashbulb, like a roving spotlight, picks up the glee and awe on the faces of children watching a sensational show: not the circus or a cascade of free candy, but a gruesome assassination. “Their First Murder”, a Weegee masterpiece taken at a Brooklyn intersection in 1941, includes a couple of adults, too, faces contorted in disgust and grief at the daylight ambush. But the photo appeared on the front page of PM Daily under the irresistibly ghoulish headline: “School children see gambler murdered in the street.” The photographer hides the gore, and we observe the drama only through the audience’s gaze.
The International Center of Photography’s pithy exhibition of Weegee’s work, Society of the Spectacle, revolves around the spectator. A virtuoso of voyeurism, he discovered the benefits of stepping back and turning around, nabbing not just criminals and victims but also the expressive chorus of bystanders. He framed disaster as a social event in the life of the city, a magnet for the full range of reactions from prurience to compassion.
In Bystanders Watching Fire at Aeronautics Factory he captures a group gathering to gawp at a blaze on East 36th Street in Manhattan. The flash illuminates the audience’s open-mouthed stares, a sea of white ovals floating against a blackened backdrop. The Empire State Building looms in the distance, a sinister presence outlined in pinpricks of light.
The quickest, most cunning and New Yorkiest of all street photographers, Weegee treated mundane horrors as a form of show business. It’s a truism by now that Instagram (or, before that, TV or the movies) taught the world how to pose. But it took a pro such as Weegee to prove that everyone has an actor inside, waiting to be released.
Violent death fascinated him especially for what it revealed about onlookers — about all of us, that is. To look at one of his photos is to join the crowd, to become a connoisseur of grisliness. (It’s too bad that the ICP’s installation undercuts this complicity with glass-fronted frames and awkward lighting, forcing viewers to squint around their own reflections.)
He also spotlighted carnage for its own sake: the body of the gangster Dominick Didato sprawls on a filthy Manhattan sidewalk, his face bloodied but his straw boater pristine. When shooting car crashes, he zoomed in lovingly on ravelled steel and crushed flesh.
The freelance hustler Arthur Fellig took his nom de shutter from the Ouija board, a tongue-in-cheek way to account for his knack for beating the police to a crime scene. His real trade secrets were a shortwave radio, a car, and a roving office in the boot, but he also had a reasonable claim to stage-directing murder scenes even before they took place.
“Get a light-coloured [car],” he advised would-be wise guys. “Light grey and watch the interior decor — have it in good taste.” Dark vehicles came out looking like murky blobs in the papers, obscuring the marketing value of a public hit. Such aesthetic concerns might seem like gilding the slaughter, but trigger men apparently complied. This was New York, after all, where murder had its fashionable side, and where cops and perps shared a taste for immaculately shined shoes.
Fellig was born in Złoczów (now Zolochiv, Ukraine) in 1899 and immigrated to the US when he was 10. The large Jewish family settled on the Lower East Side, whose tenements provided the setting for the boy’s recurring nightmares. His scholarly dad failed to earn a living, and Arthur left school at 14 to support the family. (Fellig père eventually became a rabbi and, at last, a source of filial pride.)
Before settling on photography, Weegee delivered newspapers, peddled candy and did whatever other odd jobs he could cadge. On bad nights, he crashed on park benches, railway waiting rooms or flop house floors. Then came a real job in the darkroom of Acme Newspictures, where he learned to print photos and see in monochrome. Twelve years later he was out on his own as Weegee the Famous, a free agent at last.
He hunted by night, savouring the city’s desolate streets as he sped to the latest stabbing. “In this life you have to do some sacrificing,” he told fellow photographer Ralph Steiner. “You have to see your movies in the morning, make love in the afternoon, but it’s interesting.”
He wasn’t above staging the decisive moment if it didn’t present itself unbidden. His favourite picture was “The Critic” (1943), the product of a well-choreographed ambush. Weegee plucked a down-and-outer from her regular stool at Sammy’s, a celebrated dive on Bowery, and deposited her at an entrance to the Metropolitan Opera. When two fur-trimmed, jewel-encrusted socialites stepped into the frame along with his planted derelict, he pounced. The flash exposes bleached-blonde wealth side-by-side with squalor. An Acme caption turns the contrast into a haiku on inequality. “She is aghast at the quantity of diamonds in evidence at a wartime opening of the Met, but the bejewelled ladies are aware only of Weegee’s clicking camera.”
Despite the predatory techniques, he was a genuine photo-populist, a “paparazzo of the nameless”, in the critic Max Kozloff’s phrase. He held squares of crumpled plastic in front of his lens, turning it into an instant caricature machine and rendering celebrities grotesque. In 1943, he took a rapid-fire sequence of a patriotic circus stunt: Miss Victory (née Eglie Zacchini) being shot out of a cannon at 360ft a second. As armies clashed across the world, Weegee landed on the perfect metaphor for the might of American women in wartime. Finally, he had found an act of violence that justified all that amazement and delight.
To May 5, icp.org
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