(Weegee almost certainly posed the chil-
dren and told them to keep their eyes
shut.) Still, Weegee often exhibited an
immigrant’s pride—Bonanos calls him
a “proud Jew”—that can be seen as
broadly political. One looks at the pic-
tures he made in Chinatown and Little
Italy toward the end of the war, full of
American flags and patriotic embraces,
and senses his appreciation of the eclec-
tic energies at play in the city, along with
a feeling that the old tenement world
was ready to take a fine leap toward
something better.
Even when not explicitly activist,
Weegee’s stance remains compassion-
ate. Down on the Bowery, Sammy’s—a
self-conscious dive frequented by booze-
hounds, talentless belters, a dwarf mas-
cot, and uptown slummers—was the
place Weegee chose for his book par-
ties, somewhere he could both gape and
show of. The bar was itself a contriv-
ance, a kind of nightly photo op, but the
pictures Weegee took there manage to
be both exploitative and humane.
How literally true, and how staged,
was Weegee’s work? In “Bystander,”
Westerbeck and Meyerowitz show that
early street photographers tried “to bully
or finagle their subjects into behaving
naturally.” This fundamental tension be-
tween a composed pictorialism and a
trouvé “snapshot aesthetic” persisted in
photography decade after decade. Alfred
Stieglitz, as if trying to negotiate a com-
promise, would sometimes frame a setup
and wait for passersby to wander into it;
Brassaï orchestrated his photographs; on
occasion Ben Shahn included his wife
as a “fake subject” among real ones.
Bonanos admits that Weegee would
sometimes “give the truth some extra
help,” and when it comes to what he
calls “minor adjustments” the biogra-
pher doesn’t mount an especially high
horse. Still, he doesn’t hide the whop-
pers that amount to fake views. On No-
vember 22, 1943, Weegee’s most egre-
gious cheating produced his most
famous picture, “The Critic”: a scrag-
gly, impoverished woman looks scorn-
fully at a pair of fur-clad, tiara-wearing
ladies arriving at the opera. The ladies
are actually behaving more naturally
than the down-on-her-luck observer, a
woman Weegee found at Sammy’s and
plied with drink before taking her up-
town to complete his scheme. When
BRIEFLY NOTED
First Person, by Richard Flanagan (Knopf ). The narrator of
this novel is an angsty aspiring novelist who is summoned
from Tasmania to Melbourne for a ghostwriting assignment.
His subject, an infamous con man called Ziggy, is infuriat-
ingly evasive. “I have been missing since I was born,” he
ofers by way of an origin story. As the ghostwriter contends
with underworld escapades, farcical publishing-industry pos-
turing, and his gnomic subject, he becomes obsessed with
the boundary between fiction and reality. Flanagan cannot
quite make Ziggy’s magnetism or sinister influence plausi-
ble, but the novel, with its switchbacking recollections and
cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, even-
tually, death, is enigmatic and mesmerizing.Woman at 1,000 Degrees, by Hallgrímur Helgason, translated
from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon (Algonquin). Near the
opening of this black-humored novel, a bedridden eighty-year-
old woman living in a Reykjavík garage schedules her crema-
tion and embarks on her life story. The daughter of an enthu-
siastic Nazi collaborator, she is ten at the start of the Second
World War. Separated from her parents, she endures many
horrors. But her story, based on true events, is no predictable
chronicle of wartime woe: she is pitiless toward everyone, her-
self included, unapologetic about having been a stone-hearted
lover, a neglectful mother, and a reckless globe-trotter. Al-
though the prose can be clumsily staccato, the narrator re-
counts her misshapen life with engaging vividness.The Girl from Kathmandu, by Cam Simpson (Harper). In the
coverage of the Iraq War, the kidnapping and murder of
twelve Nepalese men by a terrorist group, in 2004, was merely
a detail. But Simpson’s investigations into how these men
ended up in Iraq helped launch a decade-long legal battle
on behalf of the victims’ families. Simpson tells a complex
story about how the intersection of privatized wars and glo-
balization heightens the vulnerability of transnational labor-
ers. The book has several unassuming heroes: a young widow
and a resourceful sociologist in Kathmandu, and legislators
and tireless pro-bono lawyers in Washington. Still, the pur-
suit of justice, as Simpson recounts, is endlessly hampered
by the cynical tactics of deep-pocketed defense contractors.Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, by Miles J.
Unger (Simon & Schuster). When Pablo Picasso unveiled “Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon” to his friends, in 1907, the response
was unanimous: a “horrible mess,” as Leo Stein declared. It
was nine years before Picasso dared to show the painting in
public. But it marked a breakthrough, both for the artist and,
as Unger illustrates in this history, for art itself, heralding the
birth of Cubism. The book is framed as a hero’s journey, fol-
lowing the young Picasso through the lean years of the Blue
and Rose periods. Bohemian Montmartre comes brilliantly
to life, as do the artist’s struggles. Even those familiar with
the story will cheer when, after roughly a decade of search-
ing, he declares, “I knew I had found my way.”