Weegee
Encyclopedia
Weegee was the pseudonym
of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer
and photojournalist
, known for his stark black and white street photography
.
Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and '40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick
.
, Ukraine
), near Lemberg
, Austrian
Galicia. His name was changed to Arthur when he emigrated with his family to live in Iraq in 1909.
Fellig earned his nickname
, a phonetic rendering of Ouija
, because of his frequent, seemingly prescient
arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities. He is variously said to have named himself Weegee or to have been named by either the staff at Acme Newspictures or by a police officer.
(The Critic, 1943), turned out to have been staged.
Most of his notable photographs were taken with very basic press photographer equipment and methods of the era, a 4x5 Speed Graphic
camera preset at f/16, @ 1/200 of a second with flashbulbs and a set focus distance of ten feet. He was a self-taught photographer with no formal photographic training . Weegee developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car. This provided an instantaneous result to his work that emphasized the nature of the tabloid industry and literally gave the images a “hot off the press” sensation.
In 1943 five of his photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art
. These works were included in their exhibition entitled, Action Photography. He was later included in another MoMA show organized by Edward Steichen
, and he lectured at the New School for Social Research. Advertising and editorial assignments for magazines followed, including Life and beginning in 1945, Vogue.
Naked City (1945), was his first book of photographs. Film producer Mark Hellinger
bought the rights to the title from Weegee. In 1948, Weegee's aesthetic formed the foundation for Hellinger's film The Naked City
. It was based on a gritty 1948 story written by Malvin Wald
about the investigation into a model's murder in New York. Wald was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, co-written with McCarthy-era blacklisted screenwriter, Albert Maltz
. Later the title was used again for a naturalistic television police drama series, and in the 1980s, it was adopted by a band, Naked City (band)
, led by the New York experimental music
ian John Zorn
.
's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
. His accent was one of the influences for the accent of the title character in the film, played by Peter Sellers
.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Weegee experimented with panoramic photographs, photo distortions and photography through prisms. Using a plastic lens, he made a famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe
in which her face is grotesquely distorted yet still recognizable. For the 1950 movie The Yellow Cab Man
, Weegee contributed a sequence in which automobile traffic is wildly distorted. He is credited for this as "Luigi" in the film's opening credits. He also traveled widely in Europe in the 1960s, where he photographed nude subjects. In London he befriended Harrison Marks and the model Pamela Green
whom he photographed.
In 1980 Weegee’s widow, Wilma Wilcox, Sidney Kaplan, Aaron Rose
and Larry Silver
formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints made from Weegee’s original negatives. As a bequest, Wilma Wilcox donated the entire Weegee archive to the International Center of Photography
in New York. This 1993 gift became the source for several exhibitions and books include "Weegee's World" edited Miles Barth (1997) and "Unknown Weegee" edited by Cynthia Young (2006).
The lead character of Bernzy, played by Joe Pesci
, in the 1992 film The Public Eye
, was strongly inspired by Fellig.
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
and photojournalist
Photojournalism
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...
, known for his stark black and white street photography
Street photography
Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and other settings....
.
Weegee worked in the Lower East Side of New York City as a press photographer during the 1930s and '40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city's emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death. Weegee published photographic books and also worked in cinema, initially making his own short films and later collaborating with film directors such as Jack Donohue and Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
.
Name
Weegee was born Usher Fellig in Złoczów (now ZolochivZolochiv
Zolochiv is a town located in the Lviv Oblast of western Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Zolochiv Raion ....
, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
), near Lemberg
Lviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...
, Austrian
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...
Galicia. His name was changed to Arthur when he emigrated with his family to live in Iraq in 1909.
Fellig earned his nickname
Nickname
A nickname is "a usually familiar or humorous but sometimes pointed or cruel name given to a person or place, as a supposedly appropriate replacement for or addition to the proper name.", or a name similar in origin and pronunciation from the original name....
, a phonetic rendering of Ouija
Ouija
The Ouija board also known as a spirit/fire key board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9, the words "yes", "no", "hello" and "goodbye", and other symbols and words are sometimes also added to help personalize the board...
, because of his frequent, seemingly prescient
Precognition
In parapsychology, precognition , also called future sight, and second sight, is a type of extrasensory perception that would involve the acquisition or effect of future information that cannot be deduced from presently available and normally acquired sense-based information or laws of physics...
arrivals at scenes only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies were reported to authorities. He is variously said to have named himself Weegee or to have been named by either the staff at Acme Newspictures or by a police officer.
Photographic technique
Some photos, like the juxtaposition of society grandes dames in ermines and tiaras and a glowering street woman at the Metropolitan OperaMetropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an opera company, located in New York City. Originally founded in 1880, the company gave its first performance on October 22, 1883. The company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager...
(The Critic, 1943), turned out to have been staged.
Most of his notable photographs were taken with very basic press photographer equipment and methods of the era, a 4x5 Speed Graphic
Speed Graphic
Produced by Graflex in Rochester, New York, the Speed Graphic is commonly called the most famous press camera. Although the first Speed Graphic cameras were produced in 1912, production of later versions continued until 1973; with the most significant improvements occurring in 1947 with the...
camera preset at f/16, @ 1/200 of a second with flashbulbs and a set focus distance of ten feet. He was a self-taught photographer with no formal photographic training . Weegee developed his photographs in a homemade darkroom in the back of his car. This provided an instantaneous result to his work that emphasized the nature of the tabloid industry and literally gave the images a “hot off the press” sensation.
Late 1930s to mid 1940s
In 1938, Fellig was the only New York newspaper reporter with a permit to have a portable police-band shortwave radio. He maintained a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car, to expedite getting his free-lance product to the newspapers. Weegee worked mostly at nightclubs; he listened closely to broadcasts and often beat authorities to the scene.In 1943 five of his photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
. These works were included in their exhibition entitled, Action Photography. He was later included in another MoMA show organized by Edward Steichen
Edward Steichen
Edward J. Steichen was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator. He was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz' groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Steichen also contributed the logo design and a custom typeface...
, and he lectured at the New School for Social Research. Advertising and editorial assignments for magazines followed, including Life and beginning in 1945, Vogue.
Naked City (1945), was his first book of photographs. Film producer Mark Hellinger
Mark Hellinger
Mark Hellinger was an American journalist, theatre columnist, and film producer.-Early life and career:Hellinger was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York City, although in later life he became a non-practicing Jew. When he was fifteen, he organized a student strike at Townsend Harris...
bought the rights to the title from Weegee. In 1948, Weegee's aesthetic formed the foundation for Hellinger's film The Naked City
The Naked City
The Naked City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Jules Dassin. The movie, shot partially in documentary style, was filmed on location on the streets of New York City, featuring landmarks such as the Williamsburg Bridge the Whitehall Building and an apartment building on West 83rd...
. It was based on a gritty 1948 story written by Malvin Wald
Malvin Wald
Malvin Daniel Wald was an American screenwriter most famous for writing the 1948 police drama The Naked City, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Story. He wrote over 150 scripts for motion pictures and TV shows including Peter Gunn, Daktari, and Perry Mason...
about the investigation into a model's murder in New York. Wald was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, co-written with McCarthy-era blacklisted screenwriter, Albert Maltz
Albert Maltz
Albert Maltz was an American author and screenwriter. He was one of the Hollywood Ten who were later blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses....
. Later the title was used again for a naturalistic television police drama series, and in the 1980s, it was adopted by a band, Naked City (band)
Naked City (band)
Naked City was an avant-garde music group led by saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Active primarily in New York City from 1988 to 1993, Naked City was initiated by Zorn as a "composition workshop" to test the limits of composition in a traditional rock band lineup...
, led by the New York experimental music
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
ian John Zorn
John Zorn
John Zorn is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer...
.
1950s and 1960s
Weegee experimented with 16mm filmmaking himself beginning in 1941 and worked in the Hollywood industry from 1946 to the early 1960s, as an actor and a consultant. He was an uncredited special effects consultant and credited still photographer for Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, commonly known as Dr. Strangelove, is a 1964 black comedy film which satirizes the nuclear scare. It was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling...
. His accent was one of the influences for the accent of the title character in the film, played by Peter Sellers
Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE , known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr...
.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Weegee experimented with panoramic photographs, photo distortions and photography through prisms. Using a plastic lens, he made a famous photograph of Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
in which her face is grotesquely distorted yet still recognizable. For the 1950 movie The Yellow Cab Man
The Yellow Cab Man
The Yellow Cab Man is a 1950 comedy film directed by Jack Donohue starring Red Skelton, Gloria DeHaven and Edward Arnold. The inventor of unbreakable glass tries to sell it to a taxicab company, hoping that they will make unbreakable windshields.-Cast:*Red Skelton as Augustus 'Red' Pirdy*Gloria...
, Weegee contributed a sequence in which automobile traffic is wildly distorted. He is credited for this as "Luigi" in the film's opening credits. He also traveled widely in Europe in the 1960s, where he photographed nude subjects. In London he befriended Harrison Marks and the model Pamela Green
Pamela Green
Pamela Green was an English glamour model and actress, best known at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s...
whom he photographed.
In 1980 Weegee’s widow, Wilma Wilcox, Sidney Kaplan, Aaron Rose
Aaron Rose
Aaron Rose is a film director, art show curator and writer who is a key part of the Beautiful Losers art movement, which has featured and helped notarize the work of artists such as Barry McGee, Steven "Espo" Powers, Harmony Korine and Shepard Fairey...
and Larry Silver
Larry Silver
Larry Silver is an American born artist and was a member of the Photo League. The artist's work resides in various museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale University...
formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints made from Weegee’s original negatives. As a bequest, Wilma Wilcox donated the entire Weegee archive to the International Center of Photography
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...
in New York. This 1993 gift became the source for several exhibitions and books include "Weegee's World" edited Miles Barth (1997) and "Unknown Weegee" edited by Cynthia Young (2006).
The lead character of Bernzy, played by Joe Pesci
Joe Pesci
Joseph Frank "Joe" Pesci is an American actor, comedian, and musician.He is known for playing a variety of different roles, from violent mobsters to comedic leads to quirky sidekicks...
, in the 1992 film The Public Eye
The Public Eye (film)
The Public Eye is a 1992 American neo-noir film written and directed by Howard Franklin, and produced by Robert Zemeckis and Sue Baden-Powell. The drama features Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci, and Richard Schiff....
, was strongly inspired by Fellig.
Further reading
- Weegee by Weegee (1961, autobiography)
- Miles Barth, Weegee's World
- Kerry William Purcell, Weegee (Phaidon, 2004)
- Anthony Lee, Weegee and Naked City (Defining Moments in American Photography)