by events: thanks to rackets-busting and
a male-draining World War, New York
was headed for a prolonged plunge in
the rate of local killings.
Weegee liked being known as “the
oicial photographer for Murder Inc.,”
but his gangland pictures lack the pity
and fear—as well as concupiscence—
that his camera extracted from people
committing crimes of passion and sheer
stupidity. In the summer of 1936, he
made a splash with photographs of the
teen-age Gladys MacKnight and her
boyfriend after their arrest for the
hatchet murder of Gladys’s disapprov-
ing mother. In one of the pictures, the
adolescent couple look calm and a lit-
tle sullen, as if they’d been grounded,
not booked for capital murder. Weegee
displays a discernible compassion to-
ward the panicked chagrin of Robert
Joyce, a Dodgers lover who shot and
killed two Giants fans when he was
loaded with eighteen beers; his face
reaches us through Weegee’s lens as
he’s sobering up, beside a policeman,
his eyes wide with the realization of
what he’s done. Weegee never got his
wish to shoot a murder as it was hap-
pening, but his real gift was for photo-
graphing targets after they’d ripened
into corpses. He “often remarked,”
Bonanos notes, “that he took pains to
make the dead look like they were just
taking a little nap.”
Weegee’s pictures are full of actual
sleepers—along with those coöperatively
feigning slumber for the camera—in
bars and doorways, atop benches and
cardboard boxes, in limousines and toi-
let stalls, at Bowery missions or back-
stage. He became to shut-eye what Ed-
ward Weston was to peppers and Philippe
Halsman would be to jumping. Even
his photographs of mannequins, another
frequent subject, seem to evince a fasci-
nation with, and perhaps a yearning for,
rest. The dummies don’t so much ap-
pear inanimate as etherized, ready to re-
join the urban rat race once they’ve got-
ten forty winks.
The voyeur was also an exhibition-
ist. Weegee sometimes surrendered his
camera so that he could inhabit a shot
instead of creating it. That’s him next
to an open trunk with a corpse, and there
he is dressed as a clown, photographing
from a ring of the circus. In 1937, Life
commissioned him to do a photo-essay
about a police station’s booking process.
He turned it into a feature about a crime
photographer: him. His grandiosity grew
with the years, despite, or because of, his
self-diagnosed “great inferiority com-
plex.” He took credit for helping to make
Fiorello LaGuardia famous (never mind
that LaGuardia was already mayor), and
wrote in his memoir that he and the
gossip columnist Walter Winchell “had
a lot of fun together, chasing stories in
the night.” The index to Neal Gabler’s
stout biography of Winchell yields no
mention of Weegee.
In his début show, at the Photo
League, Weegee exhibited a supremely
afecting picture of a mother and daugh-
ter weeping for two family members
who are trapped inside a burning ten-
ement, and titled it “Roast.” A few years
later, for “Naked City,” the book of pho-
tographs that forever secured his rep-
utation, Weegee renamed the image “I
Cried When I Took This Picture.” Cyn-
thia Young, a curator at the I.C.P., has
written that the retitled photograph
became “a new kind of self-portrait,
making the photographer part of the
subject of the picture,” though she points
out that some of the Photo League’s
left-leaning members had disliked the
original label. Did Weegee really cry?
Colin Westerbeck once commented,
“No, Weegee, you didn’t. You took that
picture instead of crying.” The truth
about the retitling lies not somewhere
in between but at both poles. The man
who once said, “My idea was to make
the camera human,” experienced emo-
tion at the fire; then crafted a sick joke
about it; then, later still, realized that
the image would go over better with
sobs than with smart-assedness. Take
away the question of intention and the
picture one is left with remains, indis-
putably, a moment cut from life with a
tender shiv.
The secret of Weegee’s photogra-
phy—and the M.O. of his coarse life—
was an ability to operate as both the
giver and the getter of attention. Wee-
gee didn’t learn to drive until the
mid-nineteen-thirties, and before get-
ting his license he relied on a teen-age
driver, who took him not only to break-
ing news but also to his favorite brothel,
in the West Seventies. The madam there,
named May, “had peepholes in the wall,”
and she and Weegee would watch theFind your favorite
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Bruce Eric Kaplan, January 9, 1995“Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Next!”