boy chaufeur perform in the next room.
Weegee excised this last detail from the
manuscript of his memoir, but merely
to save the driver from embarrassment.
In the early forties, he carried his in-
frared camera into dark movie theatres
to photograph couples who were neck-
ing, and then sold the credited images.
He also took some remarkable pictures
of people in drag under arrest. In these
images, the voyeur in Weegee seems
overwhelmed by a respectful solidarity
with his subjects’ defiant display. In his
memoir, he writes about getting “a tele-
gram from a men’s magazine; they
wanted pictures of abnormal fellows
who liked to dress in women’s clothes.
I would call that editor and tell him
that what was abnormal to him was
normal to me.”
Weegee liked to say that he was look-
ing for “a girl with a healthy body and a
sick mind.” The two most important
women in his history were unlikely
candidates for extended involvement.
Throughout the early and mid-nine-
teen-forties, Wilma Wilcox, a South Da-
kotan studying for a master’s in social
work at Columbia, provided Weegee
with the non-clingy company he pre-
ferred; what Bonanos calls “her mix of
social-worker patience and prairie stur-
diness” allowed her to survive his “erratic
afection.” In 1947, he married a woman
named Margaret Atwood, a prosperous
widow whom he had met at a book sign-
ing for “Weegee’s People,” a follow-up
to “Naked City.” The marriage lasted a
few years. Weegee pawned his wedding
ring in lieu of getting a divorce.T
he voyeur-exhibitionist dynamic
reached its peak when Weegee was,
in Bonanos’s phrase, “watching the
watchers”—an interest that grew over
time. His pictures of people observing
crime, accident, and even happy specta-
cle extended what Westerbeck and Mey-
erowitz see as street photography’s long
tradition of memorializing the crowd
instead of the parade. In 2007, the New
York State Supreme Court airmed the
street photographer’s right to take pic-
tures of people in public, something that
had never much worried Weegee. “Poor
people are not fussy about privacy,” he
declared. “They have other problems.”
Weegee made three of his greatest
views of viewers between 1939 and 1941.
The first of them shows people neatly
arranged in the windows of a Prince Street
apartment building, looking out into the
night as cheerfully as if they’d just been
revealed from behind the little paper flaps
of an Advent calendar. Below them, in
the doorway of a café, is what’s brought
them to the windows: a corpse claimed
by the Mob and a handful of well-dressed
police detectives. “Balcony Seats at a Mur-
der” ran in Life, portraying harmless, guilt-
free excitement, a carnival inversion of
what a generation later might have beenrecorded at Kitty Genovese’s murder.
In the summer of 1940, Weegee cap-
tured a cluster of beachgoers observ-
ing an efort to resuscitate a drowned
swimmer. The focus of the picture is a
pretty young woman, the person most
preoccupied with the camera, the only
one giving it a big smile. She doesn’t
disgust the viewer; she pleases, with
her longing to be noticed, and her de-
lighted realization that she, at least, is
breathing. She’s the life force, in all its
wicked gaiety.
The following year, Weegee made
the best of his gawker studies, a picture
prompted by what Bonanos identifies
as “a small-time murder at the corner of
North Sixth and Roebling Streets,” in
Williamsburg. In it, more than a dozen
people, most of them children, exhibit
everything from fright to squealing rel-
ish. “Extra! Weegee!” reveals that the
Acme caption for this kinetic tableau
was “Who Said People Are All Alike?,”
which Weegee, with his taste for the
body blow, changed to “Their First Mur-
der.” The killing that’s taken place is
merely the big bang; the faces, each a
vivid record of the ripple efects of crime,
become the real drama.
“I have no time for messages in my
pictures. That’s for Western Union,”
Weegee said, swiping Samuel Goldwyn’s
line. But once in a while he made a pho-
tograph with clear political intent, such
as the one of Joe McWilliams, a fascis-
tic 1940 congressional candidate shown
looking at, and like, a horse’s ass. There’s
also the image of a black mother hold-
ing a small child behind the shattered
glass of their front door, smashed by
toughs who didn’t want them moving
into Washington Heights. Most delib-
erately, Weegee made a series of car-
wreck pictures at a spot on the Henry
Hudson Parkway where the of-ramp
badly needed some fencing; he was proud
that their publication helped get a bar-
rier installed.
In a foreword to “Naked City,” Wil-
liam McCleery, a PM editor, detected a
crusading impulse in Weegee’s picture
of poor children escaping a New York
heat wave: “You don’t want those kids
to go on sleeping on that fire escape for-
ever, do you?” Bonanos, too, thinks this
photograph was made and received with
indignation, but the image has always
been more picturesque than disturbing.