Arthur Fellig (1899–1968), best known as Weegee, the pseudonym he took about the time he became a freelance photographer in 1935, established his reputation as the recorder of sensational, tabloid-worthy images. An American born in Austria, he arrived in New York when he was ten. His family settled in the notorious tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where they joined a large population of Jewish immigrants. He literally grew up on the streets of New York, which proved formative for the photographs he would later create as a professional. His father, a rabbi, refraining from working on the Sabbath, concerned himself largely with religious matters, doing little to provide for his wife and children. His son left school at age fourteen to begin work so he could contribute to the support of his family. It was an unsettled life, and the Felligs were always on the edge of poverty.
By 1924, Weegee had secured a position as a commercial darkroom assistant for Acme Newspictures, learning the basic skills required of a photographer. After a decade he decided to become a freelance press photographer in 1935. His specialty became shooting pictures to accompany tabloid headlines. The rise and wide distribution of the picture press, and the technological advancements of the wire photo as a means of transmitting halftone images by telegraph supported the instantaneous nature of tabloid photography, which always had to be one step ahead of the competition. These magazines brought welcome distraction to Depression-era Americans, and remain an invaluable historical record of New York. Weegee was often the first to bring his coverage of an event back to his publisher, developing plates in the back of taxis, rented private ambulances, or in the driver’s stall on subway cars. His competitive brashness would become legendary.
Simply add Boiling Water, December 18, 1943, reveals Weegee’s sense of humor as fire engines douse a burning building with water in an attempt to put out the flames. The source of the title was a billboard advertisement on the building for Hygrade frankfurters, which displays the text “simply add boiling water.” Fires in big buildings with their dramatic flames and smoke and bustle of activity were popular subjects for photojournalists, and in his autobiography, Weegee noted that he had heard stories of photographers setting a fire in a desperate attempt to have a story to cover. The humor he found in the sign handily adjacent to the fire contrasts with the harsh reality of the burning building.
That he had grown up as part of a low-income family living in a tenement apartment made him disdain the bourgeois, and when he had assignments to document New York’s elite, he tried to make photographs that he thought would appeal to his lower-class readers. For instance, when he photographed a group of men waiting for their limousines after an evening at the opera, he satirically titled it High Hatted Hitchhikers (1940). To make sure he would
be the first to cover a breaking story, he made his home across the street from police headquarters, to give him an advantage in covering crime throughout the city.
Weegee not only befriended the police, he also established relationships with the mobsters and criminals they arrested. A real coup for him came in 1938 when he became the only photojournalist to receive a permit to install a police scanner in his car. His photography was his life and he practically lived downtown at the Manhattan police headquarters, where he would often aid the gangsters who were brought into the station, bringing them cigarettes and knowing who they needed to call to be released on bail. It required a great deal of chutzpah for Weegee to obtain the images he did. He even made suggestions to mobsters on how they might commit their crimes in order to make better photographs for the tabloids. Weegee became famous in his own right, creating a marketable and identifiable persona. Once he confronted Alfred Steiglitz: “You Stieglitz? I’m Weegee. You may have read about me in magazines, or seen my pictures in PM.”1 In order to ensure proper crediting to the photographer, pictures would appear in magazine editorials and tabloids with Weegee’s personal seal of approval, a rubber stamp declaring “photo by Weegee, the famous.” His moniker may have derived from the Ouija board, a popular twenties game that supposedly enabled players to predict the future. Its obvious spiritual hoax with a suggestive psychic presence, corresponded to Weegee’s ability to arrive and photograph a crime scene even before police had been dispatched. His choice of name may also reference his time as darkroom assistant, the sound of the word “squeegee” suggesting “Weegee.”
Weegee became involved with the Photo League, a group of socially conscious photographers, and in 1941, the year he joined the League, that group presented an exhibition of his work, “Murder is my Business.” The seemingly sleepless photographer revealed the “throwaway culture” of tabloid photography, presenting not aesthetic concerns but “action-packed scenes of contemporary city life in his lurid montages of urban vice and sensation.”2 In 1945, Weegee published his images in Naked City, followed the next year by Weegee’s People. Now famous and successful, he moved to Hollywood, and his work there resulted in a third book, Naked Hollywood (1953).
Robert Sturges
Weegee, Simply Add Boiling Water, December 18, 1943, Weegee, a portfolio (1940s–1950s), 1981, gelatin silver print, 41 x 31.8