he republished his opera photographs
a couple of years later, his printed com-
mentary gave no hint of the deception.
There were plenty of occasions when
circumstances arranged themselves with-
out need of manipulation—ones Wee-
gee recognized for their unlikely, or-
ganic beauty, and took pains to capture
before they could disappear from his
viewfinder. “Extra! Weegee!” reproduces
his photograph of a church fire on West
122nd Street, where the water arcs made
by several fire hoses appear to be flying
buttresses, permanent parts of the struc-
ture they’ve just come to save. In a night-
time picture, a thin man near a lamp-
post looks like one of Giacometti’s
elongated sculptures. A shot through
the open doors of a paddy wagon re-
veals two men on opposite sides of the
van’s spare tire, covering their faces with
hats; the result is a comic mystery and
a sort of Mickey Mouse silhouette, in
which their hats look like ears.
This attraction to the bizarre suggests
Weegee as a precursor to photographers
like Diane Arbus. In “On Photography”
(1977), Susan Sontag acknowledges that
Arbus once referred to Weegee as “the
photographer she felt closest to,” but she
rejected any connection between the two
beyond a shared urban sensibility:
The similarity between [Weegee’s] work
and Arbus’ ends there. However eager she was
to disavow standard elements o photographic
sophistication such as composition, Arbus was
not unsophisticated. And there is nothing jour-
nalistic about her motives for taking pictures.
What may seem journalistic, even sensational,
in Arbus’ photographs places them, rather, in
the main tradition o Surrealist art.
And yet one can hardly discount or
fail to notice the Surrealist essence of
Weegee’s paddy-wagon picture. The
mask-like fedora might as well be Ma-
gritte’s apple. Weegee knew Surrealism
when he saw it, and the recognition came
from an artistic instinct for provocative
juxtaposition. A circus-audience picture
from 1943 shows two deadpan, hatted
women holding hatted monkey dolls in
their laps—an image that points straight
ahead to Arbus’s work.
T
he publication of “Naked City,” in
1945, brought public praise from
Langston Hughes and a congratulatory
note from Alfred Stieglitz: “My laurel
wreath I hand to thee.” If there were
critics who remained skeptical of pho-
tography’s status as art, there were now
plenty of them ready to usher this
night-crawling creature of newsprint
into the pantheon. (Several Weegees
had been exhibited in two MOMA shows
in 1943 and 1944.) Weegee did not grow
rich, but he craved fame more than
money, and he had enough of the lat-
ter to appear in advertising endorse-
ments for camera equipment.
By the time all this acclaim was upon
him, Weegee had more or less finished
doing his most interesting work. He did
shoot a girl being launched out of a can-
non, but he was not made for the space
age, let alone the era of urban renewal.
Vogue’s art director, Alexander Liberman,
brought him to the magazine for a time,
but not much came of that, and the bits
of advertising and commercial photog-
raphy that he undertook don’t engage
us now any more than they did him at
the time.
It was a mistake for Weegee to enter
the well-lit, corporate world. His power
had always come from making night
into day. With flashbulbs, and even their
riskier, flash-powder antecedent, he was
able to own and preserve the instant
when—Fiat lux!—he spun the world a
hundred and eighty degrees. For a split
second, the immigrant scrapper could
be God, or, at least, Lucifer. Actual day-
time represented exile, a demotion.
The itch to remain Weegee the Fa-
mous took him to Hollywood. Mark
Hellinger, the columnist turned producer,
seeking a sexy name for a detective movie,
had bought the rights to the title “Naked
City,” and shot the film in New York.
This was a little like Cecil B. DeMille’s
oice wanting Norma Desmond’s car
instead of Norma Desmond, but the ex-
perience of being around the production
impelled Weegee, in 1948, to shift coasts,
where he wasted a few years chasing bit
parts in films. The only significant work
from this period was a series of night-
time promotional photographs taken
across the country for a 1950 Universal
movie, “The Sleeping City.”
Weegee was back in New York by the
end of 1951, and spent much of the next
decade making pointless forays into Eu-
rope, art-house films, and soft porn. He
photographed the members of camera
clubs ogling Bettie Page, the pinup queen,
and sought connection with a youngerartistic crowd in Greenwich Village. He
once invited Judith Malina, the co-
founder of the Living Theatre, home,
then chased her around his apartment.
She recalled Weegee for Bonanos shortly
before her death: “He wanted to see the
soul of the person. He wanted to see the
essence of the person. And he certainly
wanted to see the tits of the person.”
Throughout his last years, Weegee
devoted a baling amount of time to
“distortions,” fun-house caricatures of
celebrities like Salvador Dali and Mari-
lyn Monroe. They’re interesting for a
second or two, but the car wrecks he’d
photographed years before—pulverized
and accordioned vehicles—were more
authentically, captivatingly warped. What
he considered a late creative stretch was
actually shrinkage; toward the end, he
ceased making many distinctions be-
tween art and junk. To slow the drift, he
tried old tricks, at one point even buy-
ing another pony—a replacement for
the long-dead Hypo. An attempted re-
turn to nighttime news photography
proved beyond his physical energies.
Amid the tiresome braggadocio of
Weegee’s memoir, one finds no mention
of either Margaret Atwood or Wilma
Wilcox, but the latter made a god-sent
return to Weegee at the end of his life.
Decades earlier, Wilcox had been shocked
by his storage methods—“photographs
not in files but tossed into a pork bar-
rel.” In 1964, with money from her pen-
sion, she purchased a brownstone on
West Forty-seventh Street, and allowed
Weegee, and his œuvre, to move in.
He died from a brain tumor at Christ-
mastime in 1968, and Wilcox, “the silent
hero of Weegee’s story,” according to
Bonanos, set about organizing the wild
clutter of his superabundant, uneven
work. She lived until 1993, perhaps with
a premonition of the photographic age
now upon us, an era in which that smil-
ing girl on the beach has no need of a
press photographer to get herself no-
ticed; she comes to us through her In-
stagram feed, as a selfie from which the
drowning man has probably been cropped.
Defying one of Weegee’s dicta—“A pic-
ture is like a blintz. Eat it while it’s hot”—
Wilcox succeeded in getting his messy
life’s achievement into the International
Center of Photography, which today
holds it in “about five hundred big gray
archival boxes kept cool and dry.”