News logo—as being “tough as anything,
built mostly from machined aluminum
and steel.” It was the only press creden-
tial Fellig needed at murders and fires,
where, after leaving Acme, in 1934, he
continued to show up with a manic free-
lancing zeal. A couple of years later, he
was living in a room at 5 Centre Mar-
ket Place, with no hot water but with a
handful of books, among them “Live
Alone and Like It” and “The Sex Life
of the Unmarried Adult.” He decorated
the place with his own published pho-
tographs—“like taxidermied heads on a
hunter’s wall,” as Bonanos puts it. He
got to the nighttime action so fast that
he developed (and encouraged) a repu-
tation for being psychic. Bonanos shows
that Weegee’s success had more to do
with persistence than with telepathy; a
bell connected the photographer’s room
to the Fire Department’s alarms, and he
got permission to install a police radio
in his ’38 Chevrolet. However much Wee-
gee wanted people to believe that his
professional moniker came from being
recognized as a human Ouija board, it
in fact derived from his early drudgery
as a squeegee boy—a dryer of just de-
veloped prints—in the Times’ darkroom.
Bonanos, the city editor of New York
magazine, stacks up the “nine dailies”
that chronicled the metropolis between
the two World Wars. The Times was
“prim about bloodshed, more interested
in Berlin than in Bensonhurst,” and the
Herald-Tribune wanted photographers
to show up for assignments wearing
ties. Neither employed Weegee regu-
larly, and although the tabloids ran on
visuals, his real bread and butter came
from the afternoon broadsheets, espe-
cially the Post, then full-sized and lib-
eral but just as “lousy at making money”
as it is today. The World-Telegram was
the first to give Weegee the individual
credit lines he was soon commanding
from everyone else. Bonanos resurrects
the inky roar of this world with a fine,
nervy lip: Weegee’s murder picturesbroke through not because of their “bi-
nary quality of life and death” or their
“technical felicity... with angles and
shadow play” but mostly because their
sprawled, bleeding, well-hatted and
finely shod gangsters made them “more
fun” than all the others.
Bonanos also proves himself resource-
ful, tracking down a rubbernecking
seven-year-old whom Weegee photo-
graphed after a murder in 1939, as well
as a toddler who appeared in a Coney
Island crowd scene the following year.
Readers will want to keep their Weegee
collections on the cofee table; Bonanos
describes more pictures than his pub-
lisher could reasonably reproduce, even
in a book that occasionally becomes re-
lentless and replete, like a contact sheet
instead of a selected print. But Weegee
and his world don’t encourage minimal-
ism, and, fifty years after his death, he
has at last acquired a biographer who
can keep up with him.W
eegee’s frantic pace was a matter
of economic and temperamen-
tal need. No matter how fast he might
be on his feet, the job required a lot of
waiting around between catastrophes,
and car-wreck pictures paid only two
dollars and fifty cents apiece. “Naked
City,” Weegee’s immortally titled first
book of photographs, published in 1945,
reproduces a Time Inc. check stub that
records a thirty-five-dollar payment for
“two murders.” Bonanos captured the
variation and the intensity of it all in a
“tally of unrest” from April, 1937. Over
three days, New York provided Weegee
with a felonious repast: a hammer mur-
der, an arson fire, a truck accident, a
brawl by followers of Harlem’s Father
Divine, and the booking of a young fe-
male embezzler.
During the forties, the short-lived,
liberal, and picture-laden PM, which
Bonanos sizes up as an “inconsistent and
often late-to-the story but pretty good
newspaper,” put Weegee on retainer and
made his pictures pop, bringing out their
details and sharpening their lines through
“an innovative process involving heated
ink and chilled paper.” His first exhibi-
tion, in 1941, at the Photo League’s gal-
lery, on East Twenty-first Street, gar-
nered good reviews. Its title, “Murder Is
My Business,” was a noirish bit of self-
advertisement destined to be overtaken“Dr. Eliot, would you let the dog out?”••