Known both for his preternatural ability to show up at the scene of murders, car crashes, fires and other urban calamities, as well as his bizarre distortions of world-famous figures such as Marilyn Monroe and The Beatles, the photographer Weegee, AKA Arthur Fellig, was a fascinating study in contrasts. A new exhibit from the International Center of Photography in New York City, Weegee: Society of the Spectacle explores the work and legacy of a man who in many ways was at once of his time and so far ahead of it.
“At the beginning of this project was a kind of puzzling question,” said exhibit curator Clément Chéroux, “it’s as if you had in the same body a Walker Evans and a Man Ray. How could the same photographer do that?”
A child of Jewish emigres from what is now the Ukraine, Weegee left school at a young age to join the workforce and support his family – thus began his career in photography. In fact, one account of the origins of his distinctive moniker states that it came from his work as a photo boy in the New York Times’s photo lab, where he would squeegee water off of countless photographic prints. This boundless work ethic and steely determination were to become hallmarks of Weegee’s energetic and prodigious career.
As his adoption of a professional alter ego implies, Weegee was very much a self-made creation, and he was not shy about crafting elaborate mise-en-scènes in which to situate himself for self-portraits. One shows him in a mock–mug shot, ever-present Speed Graphic camera in hand and cigar protruding enormously from his mouth. “He was someone who liked to play roles,” said Chéroux. “He had this stamp, ‘Weegee the Famous’, that he would put on the back of all his photographs. He was playing with a kind of idea that he was famous.”
The mixture of seediness, spectacle and in-your-face audacity very much captures the public image that Weegee promulgated, as well as the dramatic aesthetic that he cultivated with his photographs. Weegee built his reputation throughout the 1930s and 40s with a seemingly endless array of crime scene photos for the tabloid press that depicted murdered bodies, car crashes, fires and individuals being hauled into police headquarters. In order to be first on the scene, he made good use of a police scanner that was installed in his vehicle, and he was also known to cruise the streets of New York all night long in search of fresh shots. His lightning-fast work even led to the myth that he had a darkroom right in the trunk of his car (more likely, it was that Weegee smartly situated his photo studio right next to police headquarters).
As much as Weegee became synonymous with on-the-scene photojournalism, his career took a sharp turn when he began to make incredibly distorted, grotesque images of luminaries including John F Kennedy and Andy Warhol, and even shots of the Mona Lisa. “This is very rare in the story of photography of the 20th century,” said Chéroux. “I don’t know of any other photographer who had that same polarity – being both interested in what was right in front of the camera, and then also so interested in the darkroom manipulations. That was what struck me from the beginning.”
If there is one throughline to unite these two halves of Weegee’s output, it may be the idea of “spectacle” that is right in the exhibition’s title. As curator, Chéroux took the phrase “society of the spectacle” from French philosopher Guy Debord’s magnum opus, which advanced the argument that deep interpersonal connections between people were being replaced by a society ever more focused on surfaces and images.
Although Weegee is not known to have ever read Debord’s book (which appeared in the French just one year before his death in 1968) the overlap is beyond doubt – the cover of the book’s 1983 edition, which features a Life magazine photograph by JR Eyerman of rows of movie theater spectators wearing 3D glasses, may as well be one of Weegee’s many shots of urban dwellers turning out to stare at the latest disaster.
“Weegee had a kind of understanding that the tabloid press of the time was transforming everything into a kind of spectacle,” said Chéroux. “Very often, he had spectators in the image, you will see someone looking at the scene. He understood that if you put a spectator in, it will help someone to feel that they are a voyeur of the scene.”
Indeed some of the most striking images in the exhibit are of people acting as spectators, be they portraits of individuals sitting at the movies or of people with their heads craned upwards looking at the latest urban train wreck. Ironically, in these photos of people taking in spectacles one can see a certain kind of innocence and authenticity, as they are so lost in their wonderment that they disarm the typical masks that we have all become accustomed to wearing whenever someone is taking our photo. It is as though Weegee is opining that when we are staring at others we in fact offer up our true selves.
A similar critique of American culture can be seen in the 1939 shot Balcony Seats at a Murder, which shows groups of New Yorkers leaning out of the windows of their apartments, presumably staring at the titular event. It is as though Weegee is posing the latest happenings in the big city as a kind of modern entertainment.
“With his title, Weegee is telling us that the people looking at the murder or fire or crash are exactly like the spectators in a movie theater,” said Chéroux. “If you think about that, Weegee was very smart, he had this political consciousness. If you look at the first and second parts of career, in both case he’s criticizing the way that American society is transforming everything into a spectacle.”
With our own modern-day fixation on social media images and the endlessness of round-the-clock news, Weegee very much speaks to what the society of the spectacle has become in our time. It’s an important exhibition for introducing new audiences to someone who still has things to tell us. “I hope that people will see the exhibition and think that it’s going to help us think about today,” Chéroux said. “I equally hope that this show is also going to go the other way around, the present situation will help us think about what has come before.”
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is now on show at the ICP in New York until 5 May
