Pixiq

The blonde lay on the sidewalk, her pale blue eye gazing blankly at the streetlight. A long golden curl of hair rested on her ear. She looked like a Botticelli angel who had lost her way and fallen out of the sky.

That fall was quick, as Heaven was only as high as the roof of an East Village tenement that night. After the fall, like vultures smelling blood, a crowd of gawkers surrounded her.

The shrill song of a police siren had awakened me. I threw on jeans, grabbed my camera and raced out in the direction of the flashing lights. Elbowing my way through the mob, I found her encircled in the caress of the streetlight; the pool of blood still spreading, almost touching the nighthawks’ tattered shoes. Between the light, the blood and the shoes I saw a great, if painful photograph.

Raising my camera to frame the picture, I was about to take the shot when the Leica was shoved hard against my face. Instinctively I tightened my grip on the camera and pulled it away.

“Now, now, none of that laddie boy,” said a short, round Irish cop standing in front of me, as he began poking me in the belly with his baton.

I knew he wanted me to push back, to curse him, to do anything that would give him an excuse to swing the hard wooden baton across my face. Cops didn’t like the white kids, the scum they called us, who lived in the squalid East Village with the “others,” the blacks, the Puerto Ricans, the gays.

He pushed the baton against me harder. I was shaking.

“Hey, Murphy let de kid alone. Go pick on someone yer own size,” said a voice behind me with an accent as thick as a pastrami sandwich.

The cop glared and shoved passed me then abruptly stopped. His body relaxed and his face softened in recognition.

“Oh, it’s you. How’s the missus?” he said.

I turned to see an old guy coming towards us. Shrunken in his heavy woolen overcoat, his collar turned up against the night chill, he had a rumpled face and a very large cigar clenched in his teeth. 

“Kid,” the old man said pulling me away from the cop”if you’re gonna be a shooter, you gotta get places before the cops. Take it from me. I oughta know, name’s Weegee, Weegee the Famous”

It was the mid-sixties and I was an aspiring photographer. I had grown up in New York and knew about Weegee, but that bitter night was the only time we ever met.

Weegee owned New York the way Robert Doisneau owned Paris or Manuel Álvarez Bravo owned Mexico City. The city defined him and in return, he defined the city with his pictures.

He had been born in the Galicia in the Ukraine, in 1899. Depending upon the day of the week, it was Polish or Hungarian, German or Russian. It’s where my grandparents came from too. Arriving in the U.S. age ten, he was a short kid named Usher. America renamed him Arthur, just as it renamed my Uncle Heshie, Howard; as though new names alone would turn immigrant mugs into proper Americans.

Like so many immigrants, the Felligs lived on the Lower East Side in an apartment building packed with more people than a subway car at rush hour. Not surprisingly my immigrant relatives lived just a few blocks away.

Coming of age in the 1930s, the depression’s grip squeezed the life out of most kids’ dreams; you ended up just scrambling for a few bucks for food. Fellig, though, had an thick hide, and this was still America, the place where you could be anything you wanted to be.

And Arthur Fellig wanted to be famous and being a photographer was the way he was going to do it. 

Aggressive and ambitious, he started hanging around police stations and Bowery nightclubs looking for tips and stories from the cops and the strippers and the drunks. When he got a tip, he would race off determined to be the first one at the scene of a crime or a tragedy.

The story is that he got his moniker from the cops, who said he must have been using a Ouija (We-Jah) Board to get to places ahead of them. But Fellig never needed a Ouija Board especially after he put a shortwave police scanner in his car. While regular press photographers hung around their papers playing pinochle, he’d spend the night sitting in his car, sipping coffee out of a thermos, listening and waiting.

Weegee used a big 4x5 Speed Graphic and developed a shooting style that fit the rough lighting and tough scenes he encountered. He would pre-set the camera’s lens to f/16, it’s shutter to 1/200 sec. and pre-focus to a hyperfocal distance, this way he could use the Speed Graphic like an oversized point and shoot. For most shots, his main source of light was the camera’s large flash that fired off glass flash bulbs. Flashbulbs are pretty much a point source of light that create harsh contrasts of light and shadow giving the images the “noir” look that became a hallmark of his work.

However, getting the shot was only half the game. The papers needed prints and needed them in time to get the shots into their morning editions. Weegee built a darkroom in the trunk of his car so that after getting the shot he could process the film and make a print, on the spot. Then he’d drive off at breakneck speed to the offices of the News or the Mirror or the Trib and make the sale. (see Gallery)

And just to make sure everyone was clear about who took these photos, with the chutzpah of a ghetto raised kid, he stamped his prints,”Credit Weegee The Famous.”

But he was different than the other press photographers; he always kept his images focused on people rather than what was going on around them. For instance, in a photo taken at a Harlem house fire (see Gallery). Instead of shooting the fire; he pointed his camera at the tear-filled faces of the mother and the sister of a child who was still in the burning building.

This doesn’t mean he wasn’t above sticking the Speed Graphic in some mugs face and popping off the flash to get a shot of human stupidity. His sarcasm often got the better of him as in a shot of a stripper reading a book entitled, “Apes, Men and Morons.” (see Gallery)

His photos are rich in detail that often work like a joke's punch line to change the obvious meaning of an image into something entirely different. In his photo of a shooting victim, (see Gallery) a gun lies a few feet from the corpse. It makes a straightforward photo into a mystery. The viewer is left wondering whether the victim was shot by someone, who tossed the gun away fleeing the scene, or was this a suicide who had simply dropped the weapon as he died?

Beside the horrors of emergencies and crimes, Weegee covered the social life of the city. But he saw this world from the underdog’s point of view as you can see in his photo the “Critic.” (see Gallery) In it, he portrays the clash of social classes, contrasting the pinched faces of bejeweled and fur draped society dames with the scowling face of a working class woman.

The art world discovered Weegee in the forties, when the Museum of Modern Art exhibited a few of his pictures in a 1943 show entitled “Action Photography” and later included him in the “Family of Man” exhibit.

In 1945, Weegee published his first book, “Naked City” and followed it with “Naked New York” and “Naked Hollywood” the latter filled with his experimental “distorted” photographs of celebrities. It has a wildly puckered Marilyn Monroe on its cover. (See Gallery)

Soon after “Naked City” was published, a Hollywood producer saw it and bought its title to use for as the title of a movie about the murder of a model. In the 1950s, the title was used again for a dramatic TV series.

 It all made Weegee very famous.

Between 1946 and the early 1960s, he got occasional work in Hollywood as an actor and sometimes as a consultant. He was the still photographer on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and rumor had it, that Peter Sellers copied some of Fellig’s thick New York accent for his “Strangelove” role. Kubrick, who had been a press and magazine photographer himself in New York, coincidently attended the same high school as I did.   

He died in 1968 and since then there have been exhibitions of his photographs throughout the world. In 1992, the movie “The Public Eye,” (1992), had Joe Pesci, playing a Weegee like press photographer named “Bernzy.” However, Pesci’s character was hardly like the Weegee I met in the East Village.

I remember watching him leave that night. I thought I saw him pause under a streetlight and look back at the girl on the sidewalk. Through a cloud of blue cigar smoke, he seemed to be shaking his head.

He was “Weegee the Famous” and I guess he was damned tired of seeing so many fallen angels.

End

Note 1: Before anyone starts sending me comments saying that Weegee was not the World’s Greatest Photographer, let me say that I found him called that at http://www.first-magazine.net/2008/06/worlds-greatest-photographer-weegee-the-famous/  I thought it would make a good title for this post and I’d like to think that Weegee would have liked it.

 Note 2: I downloaded the Gallery images from the web. If you are interested in seeing more of Weegee’s work go to the library or a bookstore and take a look at some big well-reproduced Weegee images.