In 1935, when he was 35, Weegee started working as a freelance photographer in New York City. He’d gotten his hands on a police radio, which crackled day and night, and spent a lot of time in his car waiting for reports of murders, fires, and accidents. When they happened, he rushed to the scene and captured brutal imagery: gangsters face down, floating in pools of their own blood; mangled bodies in car-crash wreckage; criminals leering out of barred trucks on their way to prison.
Weegee was feeding a new beast. The tabloid press was on the rise, and his sensationalist pictures served it well. The New York Herald-Tribune, the Daily News, the New York Post, The Sun, and PM Weekly all bought in, and Weegee soon became well known.
By 1948, he was ready to trade New York City’s grit and grime for shiny Hollywood. “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.” Perhaps it had to do with the times. The gloom of the Great Depression, the doom and death of World War II, these were now behind America. And it isn’t as though Weegee was without a sense of humor. When he did turn his lens on the beautiful—high-society soirées, coiffed dames walking into the Metropolitan Opera—he didn’t hesitate to make fun.
Weegee began using 16-mm. film in his portraits of stars, which he would then distort. For example, Salvador Dalí gets an impossibly long chin, Jackie Kennedy’s forehead becomes exceptionally large, and a fish-eye lens is aimed at Marilyn Monroe’s face. Weegee called the effect the “elastic lens.” In 1963, when he was invited to the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, he came up with a new technique: he made his subjects look as though they were seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Weegee’s comic photographs would feature in the press until his death, in 1968—but they would never earn the high praise of his earlier work. “I started taking these unusual and funny pictures,” he said, “as an escape from the world of naked reality.”
In the new book Weegee: The Society of the Spectacle, the two juxtaposing sides of his career—gritty and acclaimed versus glamorous and panned—fill more than 200 pages. The book’s author, Clément Chéroux, argues that Weegee’s work is critically coherent. The photographs paint a picture of an era in all its madness. “Someday,” Weegee said of the people he shot, “they, too, will be stars.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at Air Mail
