{"id":6929,"date":"2022-10-25T20:06:40","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T20:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/liberatinglens\/?page_id=6929"},"modified":"2022-12-12T21:07:44","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T21:07:44","slug":"lovette-grace","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/liberatinglens\/lovette-grace\/","title":{"rendered":"Lovette, Grace"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Weegee: Naked City<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n
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Thesis & Background<\/h2>\n
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Usher Fellig was born in Ukraine in 1899 to a Galician Jewish family, moving to the Lower East Side about 10 years later. His family lived in among the tenement residents that came to make up many of the photographs of Weegee’s career. After moving to New York, Weegee changed his name to Arthur Fellig, finally picking up the nickname Weegee while working as a squeegee boy in a darkroom printing other people’s pictures for about 15 years, according to an interview<\/a><\/strong> by his biographer Christopher Bonanos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Weegee and his Love \u2013 his Camera (Naked City, <\/em>1945)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Weegee was an extremely influential photographer, both within the Jewish community and the industry as a whole, in the way he captured the tabloid stories of New York City that affected the immigrant and lower-class population during the 1930s and 40s. His photo book, Naked City<\/em>, is arguably one of the most popular photobooks and reached a vast audience at its time of release in 1945 due to Weegee\u2019s innovative and expressive perspective on photography.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the book, he features many different narrative groups such as crime scenes, fires, circus arts, sleeping citizens, etc. of photographs that he shot in New York City at this time. The most common way to describe Weegee\u2019s photography across all these areas is the tabloid perspective of capturing images as he shot for many magazines and newspapers that featured the stories, yet unlike other tabloid photographers, Weegee cared deeply about the narratives that he captured. Spending so many years in the darkroom, working up the slow ladder to become a tabloid photographer, Weegee held an excited, eager outlook on snapping photographs of New York City’s murders, opera houses, tenement fires, public displays of affection, etc. that he features in his book. He received special permission from the police to install a police radio in his car as well as a bell in his room connected to the Fire Department’s alarms.<\/strong><\/a> With each new grim crime, Weegee arrived on the scene before everybody else, encouraging a reputation for being a psychic, by snapping and sending out the photograph before most bystanders even had a chance to look at the crime scene.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, when shooting, Weegee focused on a different side of the crime scene. He did always capture the still body on the city sidewalk or the tenement building on fire, but more often than not, as can be seen, by the many crime scene photos he chose to include in Naked City,\u00a0<\/em>Weegee captured the reactions of those affected by the terrors. Flipping his camera towards those glaring desperately at the scene with him, Weegee was able to display real, human emotions as these victims experience one of the worst moments of their lives. He was “watching the watchers” as Dean Karayanis put it in the interview<\/strong><\/a> he conducted with Bonanos.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I Cried When I Took This Picture<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At a tenement building fire, Weegee captured this photograph of two women \u2013 a mother and her daughter \u2013 aching in grief watching their home burn down. With his camera flash, he was able to shadow the background, adding detail to the women’s faces for viewers to really feel their deep, gut-wrenching cries. We know Weegee experienced this same reaction from his title, “I Cried When I Took This Picture,” bringing his own emotional pull into his work. Underneath this photograph in his book, Weegee provided the caption: “Mother and daughter cry and look up hopelessly as another daughter and her young baby are burning to death in the top floor of the tenement…firemen couldn\u2019t reach them in time…on account of the stairway collapsing.” In photos like this one of victims, as well as photographs of murdered bodies, Weegee makes it a note to include captions detailing as much of the narrative as we can assume he was able to pick up on the scene. For most of his other photographs in the book, his captions lack this detailed, narrativized description and typically address the place or person featured in the photograph. This simple difference separates Weegee as a tabloid photographer, where his deepest passion lies.<\/p>\n

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I try to humanize the news story. Of course I ran into snags with the dopey editors. If it was a fire, they\u2019d say, \u201cWhere\u2019s the burning building?\u201d I says, \u201cLook, they all look alike.\u201d I says, \u201cLook, here\u2019s the people affected by the burning building.\u201d Well, some understood it and some didn\u2019t. – Weegee (BOMB Magazine, 07\/01\/1987<\/a>)<\/p>\n