'Unknown Weegee,' on Photographer Who Made the Night Noir (original) (raw)

Art Review

June 9, 2006

WATCHMAN, what of the night?

"Whadda you kidding? It's a zoo out there. Two deli stickups at 12 on the dot; one of the perps getting plugged. I got the picture. Roulette joint bust on East 68th. Society types. You shoulda seen the penguins run. Three a.m.: Brooklyn. Car crash. Kids. Bad."

"Four a.m., bars close. Guys asleep in Bowery doorways. But just before dawn is the worst: despair city. The jumpers start, out the windows, off the roof. I can't even look. So that's the night, New York. Ain't it grand? What a life."

The imagined speaker is Arthur Fellig, better known, and very well known, as Weegee (1899-1968). From the 1930's into the 1950's, he was a photographer for New York tabloids, the kind of papers Ralph Kramden might have read. Tireless, loquacious, invasive, he cruised the wee hours. For him the city was a 24-hour emergency room, an amphetamine drip.

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Weegee's "Auto Accident," about 1940. Credit...Weegee/International Center of Photography

You'll find him these days at the International Center of Photography in a show called "Unknown Weegee." The center owns more than 18,000 of his pictures, and most of the 95 selected by Cynthia Young, the curator, are on view for the first time, at least in a museum. At the same time, the Weegee they reveal is pretty much the one we know, though toned down a bit, turned into a social worker, even.

His story is the story of a Jewish kid, son of a rabbi, who came with his family from Europe to New York City. Independent-minded, he noodled around, did the odd job, hit the flophouses. Then he discovered photography, and he became a man with a mission. Make that obsession. Scratch that: addiction.

A freelancer by temperament, he had long-term gigs with The Daily News, The Daily Mirror and the left-leaning daily PM. His beat was the inner city, and everything was raw material: the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. He liked nights because he had the photographic turf to himself but also because the best bad things happen at night, under the cover of darkness. Vandals make their mark; hit men practice their trade; people get crazy.

Like a boy scout, he was always prepared. He prowled the streets in a car equipped with a police radio, a typewriter, developing equipment, a supply of cigars and a change of underwear. He was a one-man photo factory: he drove to a crime site; took pictures; developed the film, using the trunk as a darkroom; and delivered the prints.

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"Black Power," 1951, by Weegee.Credit...Photographs by Weegee/International Center of Photography

He often finished a job before the cops had cleared the scene, in some cases before they even arrived. About certain things he was clairvoyant. (Weegee = Ouija, as in board. Get it?) He caught catastrophes in the making and filmed them unfolding. An opportunist? A sensationalist? A voyeur? You could call him all that. He wouldn't mind. "Just get the name right. Weegee the Famous."

He was in the right place at the right time. New York from the Depression through World War II was a rude, crude town. No heat in winter, way too much in the summer. Immigrants poured in; there was barely enough room to hold them. Native-born workers felt the competition for jobs and space, resented it. The melting pot was on a constant boil.

Weegee was aware of social problems. This is one of the points the show makes. A congenital, unradical leftist, he gave his work a deliberate political slant. He documented segregation and racial-bias attacks. In one 1951 photo, he shows a black woman holding aloft a piece of paper with a picture of a gun. The paper was actually a coupon to win free admission to a new Randolph Scott movie called "Colt 45." But at some point Weegee pinned a "Black Power" button to the print to give it a pointed meaning.

The politics that really made him tick, though, were populist. He knew what Americans wanted, because he wanted it too. Sentimentality: cops holding kittens, lost kids crying. Zaniness: people dressed up as Martians, things like that. He was drawn to glamour, though not the social register stuff. That he despised. He loved to embarrass the rich, make them look like freaks.

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Weegee's "Water Main Burst Uproots Madison Avenue," about 1938, from "Unknown Weegee" at the International Center of Photography.Credit...Photographs by Weegee/International Center of Photography

Hollywood was different. Its version of classiness was, in a way, available to all. Anybody can pass out autographs like a star and probably find some takers. And if Veronica Lake could get famous for a hairdo, so could you. (Weegee's 1945 book, "Naked City," was the basis for a Hollywood movie; he himself, quintessential New Yorker, appeared as an extra in films.)

Then there was the cosmopolitan, interracial realm of club life, with Calypso singers, cocktail-swillers, exotic dancers and 1950's couples, young and in love. This part of the show is cool. These couples represented a changing America, a hinge-generation: girls who were rethinking the "good girl" gambit; boys who had missed one war and would refuse to die in another.

Death was, of course, Weegee's daily bread. Mostly it was ghastly: a shoe under the car wheel, a body under the sheet. We linger over these pictures today the way tabloid readers did then, because they demand and reward inspection. In a 1941 photo of a Brooklyn ambulance attendant tagging a body, newspapers covering the corpse include a home section advertising "Brand New Collections of Summer Rayons." There's a War Bonds sign in a nearby shop window and under it, scratched on a wall, a swastika.

Weegee was fascinated by our fascination. Some of his most absorbing pictures are reaction shots, images of crowds witnessing death or its aftermath. Often the gawkers are children, yucking it up or staring, blank.

But Weegee also had a way of making adults — the pop-eyed gangster and the distraught murderess — look like children, pitiable and silly in their unguarded public emoting. Weegee's output isn't, in the end, a humanist essay; it's a B movie. With all the mortality and pain, there is no sense of tragedy, no grappling with evil.

He deals with evil the way Americans usually deal with it: as entertainment, a bad-guy cartoon. Because Americans don't know how to take evil, their own or anyone else's, seriously, they can't see its power shaping their world. Certain artists buck the trend. Warhol, who learned a lot from Weegee, understood the reality of badness beyond redemption. He didn't moralize; he just saw that it was there. That's one reason his art is still so forceful and useful.

But Weegee, no. When he's thoughtful he teeters on maudlin; when he probes he gets cruel. Most of the time, he's just excited. Always on deadline, he can't stay with any subject for long. His method of illumination is the flashbulb. Pow! Its light gives foreground subjects hard brilliance but doesn't sink in; it leaves the depths dark. So his pictures have no inner glow. They just freeze a long-gone now. Sometimes they look like art; they always look archival.

Yet he did one great, serious thing. He was the American photographer who first made night a symbol, an existential condition. He made night noir, and this is what binds all his work together. I wonder what, as night watchman of our American Babylon, he would have thought of the present Times Square, bright as day around the clock.

"Sheesh. So, light's the new dark? I can't put my finger on why, but it don't seem right."

"Unknown Weegee" remains through Aug. 27 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000.

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