THE CRITICS
BOOKSSHOTS IN THE DARK
The street photography of Weegee the Famous.BY THOMAS MALLONP
hotography, at its mid-nineteenth-
century beginning, muscled in on
painting one precinct at a time. Por-
traiture, of a solemn, straight-on sort,
suggested itself immediately. Its hold-
still composition, simple and traditional,
met a mechanical necessity of the new
art: early studio photographers, at the
mercy of long-duration exposure, often
steadied the backs of their subjects’ heads
with clamps unseen by camera or viewer.
Landscapes held still on their own if
the wind didn’t blow, so Gustave Le
Gray could become an automated Pous-
sin, while Mathew Brady strained to
click his way past Gilbert Stuart. His-
tory painting—crowded, violent, de-
clamatory—had to postpone its pho-
tographic update until smaller cameras
made picture-taking portable and fleet.
But genre painting, with its casual as-
semblages of ordinary life, stood ready
early on to be appropriated by the new
medium.
In “Bystander” (Laurence King), a
newly updated history of street photog-
raphy, Colin Westerbeck and Joel Mey-
erowitz point out the genre’s early in-
clination toward “humble people as
subjects.” Louis Désiré Blanquart-
Evrard’s “Photographic Album for the
Artist and the Amateur” (1851) and John
Thomson’s “Street Life in London” (1877)
put images of chimney sweeps and mill-
ers in front of well-of viewers who could
regard them with curiosity and concern:
“Unlettered, uncomplicated people were
felt to preserve an otherwise lost capac-
ity for sincerity for which modern art-
ists and intellectuals yearned.” Early in
the twentieth century, as photography’s
documentary capacities turned reform-ist in the hands of Jacob Riis and Paul
Strand, it was still, as Riis’s famous title
showed, a matter of “the other half ” being
viewed by those perched far above.
Only when tabloid newspapers went
into mass circulation after the First
World War, Westerbeck and Meyero-
witz argue, did those “humble people”
become the audience as well as the sub-
ject matter. More than anyone else, it was
Arthur Fellig, self-insistently known as
Weegee the Famous, whose “photographs
of the poor were made—at least, orig-
inally—for the poor themselves.” The
New Yorkers Weegee photographed—
especially those caught up in sudden ca-
lamities of crime and fire—obtained a
kind of fame that lasted not fifteen min-
utes but more like fifteen hours, until
the next morning’s edition swept away
the previous afternoon’s.
For decades, Weegee has been col-
lected as art, thus restoring some of the
original other-half dynamic between
viewer and image. Cofee-table books
of his work abound: “Unknown Wee-
gee” (2006), produced for an exhibition
at the International Center of Photog-
raphy, is the least hefty and best arranged;
“Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935-
1960” (1982) is the grittiest. These have
recently been joined by “Extra! Weegee!”
(Hirmer), which contains nearly four
hundred photographs, alongside the orig-
inal, often exuberant, captions aixed by
Acme Newspictures, the agency through
which Weegee sold them. But there has
been no complete biography of the pho-
tographer. Now Christopher Bonanos’s
“Flash: The Making of Weegee the Fa-
mous” (Holt) has displaced a host of
fragmentary recollections and the loud-mouthed, unreliable memoir, “Weegee
by Weegee,” published in 1961.
Usher Fellig was born into a family
of Galician Jews in 1899. He became Ar-
thur sometime after arriving on the
Lower East Side, ten years later. Accord-
ing to Bonanos, his “sense of family” was
so “minimal” that he miscounted his own
siblings in that memoir. The Felligs
joined the tenement dwellers who would
soon constitute much of Arthur’s sub-
ject matter.
His coup de foudre came, he later re-
called, before he left school, in the sev-
enth grade: “I had had my picture taken
by a street tintype photographer, and
had been fascinated by the result. I think
I was what you might call a ‘natural-born’
photographer, with hypo—the chemi-
cals used in the darkroom—in my blood.”
He acquired a mail-order tintype-making
kit, and later got himself hired, at fifteen,
to take pictures for insurance companies
and mail-order catalogues. He bought
a pony on which to pose street urchins
whose parents were willing to pay for
images that made their ofspring look
like little grandees. (The pony, which he
named Hypo, ate too much and was
repossessed.) During the early nine-
teen-twenties, Fellig worked in the dark-
rooms of the Times and Acme News -
pictures, sleeping in the Acme oices
when he couldn’t make his rent. He kept
the agency’s photographers ahead of the
competition by learning to develop pic-
tures on the subway, just after they’d
been shot. By 1925, Acme was letting
him take photographs, albeit uncredited,
of his own.
Bonanos describes the Speed Graphic
camera—even now, still part of the Daily