Stieglitz. Up to the 1950s, photographers, especially
in the United States, attempted to promote some
sort of social message. After the 1950s, photogra-
phers in the United States continued to focus on
and question nature and society, but there was a
turn toward a more personal viewpoint. Many
famous names from the war, such as Margaret
Bourke-White, continued to work, but they shifted
from photojournalism to a more humanistic ap-
proach. Individualism was encouraged and the
image of the solitary photographer traveling alone
around the country became the stereotypical image
of the artist/photographer.
Thus conceptions of subject, method, and style
began to radically shift in the late 1940s. The mood
of this moment is perhaps, surprisingly, encapsu-
lated in the development of tabloid journalism from
the 1930s to the 1940s in the work of the man who is
perhaps the most famous of these photographers,
Arthur Fellig, more commonly known as ‘‘Wee-
gee.’’ The Austrian-born photographer is best re-
membered for his macabre images of New York
City in the late 1930s and 1940s, which culminated
in the publication of his bookNaked Cityin 1945.
The book includes photographs of murder victims
as well as of the curious crowds that gathered on the
streets of New York during and after the war years.
Weegee’s obsession with the grotesque side of urban
life led to his stark but memorable photographs of
life in seedy bars and the alleys behind them, filled
with prostitutes, famous gangsters, conspicuous
dwarfs, freaks of all sorts, and their voyeuristic
onlookers. Weegee had a fascination for photo-
graphing the other end of the spectrum as well.
His images of the rich and famous—Frank Sinatra,
Louis Armstrong, Jayne Mansfield—are also well-
remembered. Perhaps the most distinctive charac-
teristic for which Weegee is known is that he slept
with a police radio next to his bed (and also had one
in his car) and was often the first to arrive at a crime
scene. This was the basis for the rumor about how
he must have used a ‘‘Ouija’’ board to divine the
future—hence, one theory for how he got his name.
Most important is Weegee’s style, which is fun-
damental to an understanding of how photography
after 1945 materializes in the work of artists such as
William Klein and Robert Frank. Weegee’s signa-
ture was a strong flash with a starkly contrasting
black and white image. His style is often confron-
tational with a flash going off in the face of those
he was in pursuit of. Given that most of his images
are of night scenes in the city, this brash lighting
only adds to the uncanny atmosphere of his por-
trayals of New York nightlife. Transvestites being
taken into the police station, women crying outside
a burning building, automobile crashes, and dead
bodies revealed a different side of America than
was generally seen. Yet not all of Weegee’s photo-
graphs involve death and destitution. There are
also images filled with joy, humor, and a touch of
the burlesque, such as the memorable image of
water-soaked children gathered in the sunny sum-
mer street watching warily as a policeman turns off
the fire hydrant—perhaps their only form of
amusement—inPolice End Kids’ Street Shower—
Under Orders, August 18, 1944. Weegee also cele-
brates the diversity and paradoxes of the United
States in his vibrant images of church gatherings
and jazz concerts in Harlem and intimate shots
stolen of people sleeping or kissing in movie thea-
ters. Thus, although he would never gain the artis-
tic prominence of the photographers he inspired in
the 1950s, Weegee’s artistry and influence is nota-
bly present in the next generation.
One of the artists that represents the bridge
between the photojournalism of Weegee’s era and
the more individualistic aspects of the late 1940s and
early 1950s was William Klein. Although his work
was starkly different than the brazen images of Wee-
gee, Klein’s work is considered to border on the
grotesque and to echo the black-and-white photos
inNaked City.Although American, Klein was first a
sculptor, and began his career in France, where he
worked in the studio of Fernand Le ́ger while also
concentrating on other media such as painting and
abstract photography. Returning to New York in
the 1950s, Klein quickly gained a reputation for his
‘‘bad’’ photographs of city life. This was further
emphasized when he was noticed by American
Vogue and hired as a fashion photographer in- Uncomfortable with the workings of a photo
studio, Klein took his models out onto the streets of
New York, where he developed a unique look and
pioneered the creative use of the wide-angle lens.
In the pages ofVogueand in his own work, Klein
violated all of the rules of photography by deliber-
ately distorting and blurring his figures, and his
subject matter was also extreme images of children
with toy guns pointed at the camera. His ‘‘in your
face’’ style became a trademark and would be some-
thing we would later observe in, for example, the
efforts of Diane Arbus. Yet although his images
seem random and hasty, one can find a certain
symmetrical balance to them. Klein’s genius is
summed up in his publication New York, New
York(1956), which draws on all of his talents (and
the influences of Weegee).
Another photographer who made the transition
between WWII and the postwar era is Robert Capa.
Known for his photography of the Spanish Civil
HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: POSTWAR ERA