Text from Jane Livingston, The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963

Arthur Fellig, self-dubbed Weegee after the mystery of the Ouija board, exists for us now not just through his remarkably pungent images and their impact on people like William Klein, but also through others' recollections of him, and, most of all, through his own writings and other efforts on the subject of himself. One is struck by a quality of innate brashness, of a sort of relentless, and unwaveringly naïve, self-promotion. Corny humor was a stock in trade. This man, born in a part of Austria now within Poland's borders, takes on a character of being permanently outside the tradition - of being determinably and continually self-taught.

Weegee belongs among the first-generation members of this group: he was born a year after Brodovitch, in 1899. He began his ten-year career as a Manhattan crime photographer in 1936 - that same moment when the Photo League, Life magazine, and Brodovitch's full reign of power at Harper's Bazaar commenced. Weegee was embraced relatively early by the photographic establishment: he was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and continued to be shown there and at the Photo League. But without necessarily wanting to, he resisted the blandishments of the artistic/socially conscious establishments, at least insofar as they might have altered his photographic style.

Weegee picked up the craft of photography largely by working in a commercial photographer's studio at a very young age and partly by shooting on the streets: to posit stylistic sources for him in the traditional ways seems an absurd exercise. The images simply make most questions of "style" in photography irrelevant. This is not, however, to deny that Weegee forged an extraordinarily idiosyncratic photographic style or to ignore his considerable influence on other photographers. Virtually every member of the New York School learned from him; some among them particularly Klein, Levitt, and Model, acknowledged his influence.

Weegee holds a special place within the universe of the New York School. In a sense, he personifies more purely than any other photographer one of the key desiderata of its practitioners. His best images came about in the service not of any intentional artfulness - and not, though he might dispute this, in deference to his clients' values. His best work was done in the name of something intangible, some kind of pure intensity and presentness and momentary "truth" that only photographs could engage. Far from being a self-conscious, "socially conscious" magazine journalist, after the fashion of Margaret Bourke-White or W. Eugene Smith - and in an entirely differently spirit from most of the fashion or advertising photographers of the era - Weegee in his prime traveled a tough, risky, and always unpredictable course. He took his chances as a photographer selling his pictures to the press after they were shot. For the decade with which we are most concerned, he doggedly covered the crime beat.

It is a mistake to see Weegee's bold, harsh, often chaotic-seeming nocturnal police-call photographs as somehow accidental. Many have characterized these images' paradoxical descriptive clarity and inventive framings as a side-effect of a "straight reportorial" intention. This is nonsense. These photographs, whose brilliant framings and masterful command of flash illumination, whether by day or night, bespeak an enormously disciplined and gifted artist. Weegee obviously prized successful "composition" in his printed images as much as did Model or Klein or Arbus. But, and to some extent this was also true of the others, to acknowledge any artistic aspirations was to betray a code that was ingrained in Weegee's professional self-image.

The extent to which Weegee fooled even sophisticated aficionados of photography proves something about the extraordinary cunning with which he manipulated the way others viewed him. In Weegee - A Tribute, Bruce Downes describes Weegee's accumulated work as "an impressive collection of pictures, the photographic quality of which was uniformly poor. But however bad they were technically, what was in them was true and alive." Far from being "bad technically," Weegee's control of his medium - in his case exclusively a Speed Graphic 4 x 5 camera (the same equipment used by Sid Grossman in some of his best pictures) with Graflex-synchronized flash - can be said to have set a new standard for photojournalism. His habit was to preset to 1/200 of a second. stopped down to f16; he says he simply made it a rule of thumb to focus to a distance of ten feet. Weegee's is a case in which technique rarely impinges on the sensation of the camera's having captured traumatic or, more often, post-traumatic, experience in its most essential energy and meaning. The gritty immediacy for which his best images are known has never been equaled.

Technique and "style" become a single concern in Weegee's work: all the photographers of the New York School aimed at merging the two, but Weegee achieved it most purely. In the words of the critic and photographer John Coplans:

All Weegee's passion was centered on getting close to his material to snatch the explosive moment out of the air. Nothing else counted. There is a frantic edge to Weegee's imagery. He worked at a pointblank range and at a desperate pitch, the better to catch people in the raw... Weegee had an esthetic predilection for artificial light. He liked the way in which an object is highlighted and flattened by the freeze action of flash, and slowly dissolves into a saturated black background.

[Weegee] focused in on an event, and if an image failed to compose itself, he used the enlarger to crop and bring the image closer by eliminating superfluous detail, especially in the background, which he often burnt to a deep. flat black. Thus Weegee's images are unleavened by tonal gradations.

Weegee's way of covering the New York crime scene in the late 1930s and 1940s is well known: he cultivated relationships with several Manhattan police headquarters, fitted out his own automobile with a radio tuned to the police-call wave band, followed its calls to fires and vice-squad raids and riots and murder scenes, photographed when he got there, and sold the photographs to such New York newspapers as the Herald Tribune, the World Telegram, the Daily News, the Post, and the Sun. He was at the top of his form in the first decade of the New York School.

It wasn't, however, only nighttime crime photography that interested Weegee as a photographer in New York during the 1930s and 1940s. From 1940 to 1945, he worked for Ralph Steiner's PM'S Weekly - which he later described as "a very liberal newspaper. They never told me what to do but if a story broke I brought in the pictures." (He would have seen Model's "Why France Fell" photographs in the January 1941 PM's Weekly.) What captured Weegee's eye were often precisely the things that fascinated his compatriots of the New York School. He photographed Coney Island with just the same level of abandon and immersion evident in pictures by Grossman, Model, Frank, Arbus or Davidson; in his "Lovemaking on the Beach" images from Naked City, he literally prefigures some of Davidson's 1959 pictures. He haunted Harlem and the Lower East Side with an eye to the very street life Helen Levitt made her own. In one particular case - that of the appropriation of Sammy's Bar in the Bowery - Weegee and Lisette Model may be said to vie neck and neck for ascendancy.

In the matter of verbal description, however, Weegee wins:

At 107 Bowery, sandwiched in between Missions and quarter-a-night flophouses, is "Sammy's", the poor man's Stork Club. There is no cover charge nor cigarette girl, and a vending machine dispenses cigarettes. Neither is there a hat check girl. Patrons prefer to dance with their hats and coats on. But there is a lively floor show ... the only saloon on the Bowery with a cabaret license. As the customers arrive from uptown in cabs, they are greeted by a bunch of panhandlers who don't ask for the usual "got a nickel for a cup of coffee mister," but instead for a dime for a glass of beer, and get it too. Inside, the place is jammed with the uptown crowd mingling with the Bowery crowd and enjoying it. But towards midnight some odd types drop in for a quick one. There is a woman called "Pruneface," a man called "Horseface," "Ethel," the queen of the Bowery who usually sports a pair of black eyes that nature did not give her, a man with a long white beard who oldtimers say is looking all over the Bowery for the man who forty years ago stole his wife. They wonder when the two meet whether the wife-stealer will get beat up or thanked.

In 1943 Weegee and Model also both photographed Mrs. Cavanaugh, a New York society lady who attended openings of the Metropolitan Opera. Weegee's picture of her with another dressily garbed lady, both eyed skeptically as they alight from their limousine by a shabby female onlooker, appeared in Life, captioned "The Critic." It became one of his most famous images, of which he said:

[It] made possible the book Naked City... At the next opening of the opera house Mrs. Cavanaugh arrived and I asked her, "How did you like the picture of yourself in my book, Naked City?'' She stopped dead in her tracks, pointed a finger at me and said, "Naughty boy. Why didn't you put my name after it?" Actually the publishers were afraid to put her name under it. I says, 'What do you think of these people standing out in the cold?" She says, "Oh, I love them. If I had my way I'd take them all inside the opera house with me."