Harsh Flash: The New York Photography of Weegee

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Harsh FlashThe New York Photography of Weegee Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Weegee Using Typewriter in His Car Trunk, 1942/International Center of Photography/Getty Images [End Page 101] To me a photograph is a page from life. —Weegee Arthur Fellig, a.k.a. Weegee, revered the famous photographer Alfred Stieglitz. During the early ’40s, he often saw Stieglitz walking up and down Madison Avenue in a long black cape and hat as if in a trance. Weegee found it strange that no one paid any attention to him. With the publication of Naked City and Weegee’s People, which both sold well, Weegee had finally earned celebrity as New York City’s brash street photographer. He worked up the nerve to introduce himself to his idol. “Are you Stieglitz?” he asked. The old master of the camera invited Weegee to his studio, a small, cramped space, the walls covered in paintings and photographs like a gallery, unsteady towers of books everywhere, and an unmade cot tucked in the corner where he slept. Stieglitz was eighty-one, in poor health, had very little money and hadn’t made a photograph in ten years. He considered himself a failure and lived on memories of Berlin at the turn of the century, the happiest time of his life. Weegee’s paramount interests at the time were increasing his fame and income—money seemed to slip through his fingers—but his meeting with Stieglitz left him with the realization that these twin ambitions were fleeting and ultimately worthless. Leaving his cloistered hero’s rented room, he vowed to remain focused on the work and try to maintain his integrity. Keeping this vow was hard for a self-made immigrant son and survivor of dire poverty. As a grizzled, hard-boiled crime photographer with an ever-present cigar and porkpie hat, he was more threatening than the low-level gangsters he photographed. He lived alone and worked at night. Photography gave meaning to his existence and kept him from falling into a life of carousing Bowery dives and brothels. He was fond of saying, “I loved the racket. It’s exciting. It’s dangerous. It’s funny. It’s tough. It’s heartbreaking.” Weegee was born Usher Fellig in 1899 outside Lemberg, an Austrian province that is now part of Ukraine. An anti-Semitic campaign swept through the eastern fringes of the country in 1903, leaving his deeply religious Jewish parents financially ruined. His father, Bernard, left for America, settled in New York in a lower East Side tenement and worked as a hat salesman and assistant to a rabbi. It took him four years to save [End Page 102] money to send for his family. The voyage was a rough one, making the entire family seasick, but when young Usher saw Ellis Island, he called it “the most beautiful place in the world.” As was standard practice at the time, an immigration official Americanized his name, changing it from Usher to Arthur. Click for larger view View full resolution Weegee (Arthur Fellig), And the Living Suffer, 1944/International Center of Photography/Getty Images Despite his avid reading of Dreiser and Dostoyevsky, along with Nick Carter detective stories, Arthur was a poor student and dropped out of the seventh grade. To help feed his six brothers and sisters, he made money selling newspapers and candy bars on the streets but grew tired of the dirty, overcrowded cold-water flat with its bug-infested beds. At fifteen he left home to lessen his parents’ burden and make his own way. He enjoyed the chaos of the Lower East Side. Along with the beggars and peddlers, prostitutes and tenement gangs, he quickly figured out how to get by on the streets and was never quite comfortable anywhere else. When he couldn’t scrape together twenty-five cents for a bed in a Bowery flophouse, he slept on benches in parks and the rail station. [End Page 103] Other bums became his guardians, teaching him where he could score a job and meal. Click for larger view View full resolution Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Shameful Arrest, 1942/International Center of...