In 1935, when he was 35, Weegee began working as a freelance photographer in New York City. Equipped with a police radio, he spent hours in his car waiting for reports of murders, fires, and accidents. When they came, he raced to the scene to capture brutal imagery: gangsters face down in pools of blood, mangled bodies in car wrecks, criminals leering from barred trucks on their way to prison. By 1948, Weegee was ready to trade New York’s grit for Hollywood’s shine. “I was tired of the gangsters lying dead with their guts spewed in the gutter,” he wrote in his autobiography, “of women crying at tenement-house fires, of automobile accidents.” In Hollywood, Weegee experimented with 16-mm. film, distorting celebrity portraits with what he called the “elastic lens”—Salvador Dalí was given an impossibly long chin, Jackie Kennedy an oversized forehead, Marilyn Monroe a fish-eye close-up. Weegee’s comic photographs appeared in the press until his death, in 1968, but they never earned the accolades of his earlier work. This exhibition juxtaposes the two sides of his career—gritty and acclaimed versus glamorous and overlooked. —Elena Clavarino