Original edition of Weegee by Weegee, copyright © 1961 by Arthur Fellig (Weegee). Published by the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, New York. Weegee: The Autobiography (Annotated), copyright © 2013 by The Devault-Graves Agency, Memphis, Tennessee. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without the permission of the publishers.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-14233

ISBN: 978-0-9896714-0-8

Cover design: Martina Voříšková

Title page design: Martina Voříšková

Front cover illustration: Chris Ellis

DEVAULT-GRAVES DIGITAL EDITIONS

Devault-Graves Digital Editions is an imprint of

The Devault-Graves Agency, Memphis, Tennessee.

The names Devault-Graves Digital Editions, Lasso Books, and Chalk Line Books

are all imprints and trademarks of The Devault-Graves Agency.

www.devault-gravesagency.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: Weegee–A Tribute by Bruce Downes

1. Tintype

2. Kidnapper

3. The Golden Age of Photography

4. Crime Photographer

5. Murder, Inc.

6. Nudist Colony

7. Naked City

8. Land of the Zombies

9. The New Weegee

10. Exile

11. Photo-finish

Credits

Afterword by Ed Ward

About the Author

Weegee–Selected Bibliography

For Further Study

Endnotes

A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS

The first edition of this book, which was originally titled Weegee by Weegee and was published in 1961, contained several pages of some of Weegee’s most iconic photographs. Due to licensing and copyright restrictions as well as the limitations of fine photographic reproduction by many e-readers, we have chosen not to include them for this edition, which may disappoint some readers.

Further, we feel Weegee’s groundbreaking photographic art deserves to be seen in all its glory, the fine grain and flashbulb explosions a palette in stark black-and-white. The original edition of Naked City, even though you must pay collectors’ inflated prices for it, has the best reproductions of Weegee’s New York work, which many people consider his best. The later Da Capo reprints, we regret to say, do not begin to be worthy of Weegee’s art and are to be avoided. Weegee’s renewed popularity in the past decade has led to a number of new books of his wide-ranging photographs. Many are excellent.

You are best advised to read reviews of these books for clues as to the quality of photographic reproduction. And by all means, do not miss an opportunity to see any of the curated prints exhibited in galleries and museums such as The Museum of Modern Art.

Tom Graves

Darrin Devault

TO MY MODERN

ALADDIN’S LAMP—

MY CAMERA

WEEGEE – A TRIBUTE

Weegee, a.k.a. Arthur Fellig, began his oddball career as a plodding freelance photographer who by his imagination and showmanship bootstrapped himself to eminence. For the obtuse, he stamped his prints “by WEEGEE, the Famous,” and it wasn’t long before this rubber stamp propaganda bore fruit. Soon Weegee was admitted to the sacred mausoleum of the Museum of Modern Art. His flashbulb pictures had been accepted alongside those of such untouchables as Hill, Atget, Stieglitz and Cartier-Bresson¹ in the Museum’s permanent collection of photographic art. A lowly (though not meek) news photographer, who at the time shot straight from the shoulder without benefit of subtle lighting nuances, thus crashed the gates of art where Picasso² reigns supreme.

Like William Saroyan³ in literature, Weegee rose to eminence from something less than literate beginnings. Tradition, cultural and aesthetic standards were not to curb a certain ebullience and originality in either of these men. Saroyan, who came to fame about the same time as Weegee, threw the rules of rhetoric and writing technique to the winds, wrote as he pleased, which was with unspoiled freedom and charm, and won the Pulitzer Prize with a play. He knew nothing whatsoever about dramatic technique. Instead of adapting himself to the theater, he forced the theater to accept his original technique which flouted the whole book of rules.

When Weegee began his nocturnal photographic wanderings, he had never heard of Stieglitz or the Museum of Modern Art. He merely clamped his flash-gun to his camera and shot what interested him. He learned the simple rudiments of exposure, developing, and printing and thereafter allowed no such encumbrances as the niceties of photo technique to obstruct his perceptions. He functioned as a free agent uninhibited by any preconceived notions as to what (in the opinion of critics and photographers) constituted fine photography. Of any knowledge of art, he was completely innocent. Weegee just aimed his camera at what in the city’s life seemed (1) significant to him and (2) saleable to newspapers on whose checks he lived. He thrived at first mainly upon the minor disasters of a great city, upon its small touching tragedies, the victims of conflagration, the gruesome corpses of nocturnal murders. As the years went by he accumulated an impressive collection of pictures, the photographic quality of which was uniformly poor. But however bad they were technically, what was in them was true and alive. He had been photographing life as he saw it.

Like Saroyan, Weegee’s originality, with blockbuster impact, commanded attention and respect – aided, of course, by his own proclamations of superiority. The pundits called his pictures “Art.” Nancy Newhall, then the high priestess of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, paid muffled obeisance to Weegee’s “creative” accomplishments while admitting him to the charmed circle of the arts. This was in 1945 when Weegee was at the peak of his powers as a photographer. In that year his pictures of New York were published in a volume called Naked City. This was unspoiled Weegee, and full as it was of an urban primitive’s innocent eye, it was an immediate success.

The best of Weegee’s pictures were made on his freelance newsbeat. They are harsh and emphatic in their strong contrasts, unleavened by the tonal gradations which make good photographs visually pleasing. No matter what the subject or the mood, the emotion or the drama, these pictures were all shot in the same direct, explosive way. One is conscious always of the presence of the flashbulb as a startling intruder, an instant’s insolent violation of the night’s dark secrets or of life’s seamier side.

Weegee’s pictures are, therefore, anything but realistic. The people in them look unreal, like specters in the dark. This is a world seen through the camera’s artificial eye, which alone is capable of recording what happens when some 15 to 60 thousand lumen-seconds of light are concentrated into a split-second interval. This amounts to an explosion in which Weegee literally blasts the faces of his subjects with an intense spray of photons. The human eye cannot take this in, and what the camera finally reveals is certainly not merely an event seen in the night as we know it. One has to look carefully to be sure whether the figure of a sleeping man or child is or is not another of Weegee’s famous corpses. Display window mannequins with which (attention psychoanalysts!) Weegee is frequently preoccupied, dead racketeers, lovers on the beach, children, firemen, grief-stricken men and women, all have the same cadaverous look — ghosts against a funereal backdrop.

In spite of this spectral unreality, due in large measure to his slipshod photography in which things are shown at their worst, Weegee’s pictures do give us incisive glimpses into a world with which most of us are unfamiliar. It is a world too many of us do not know, of lives lived and tragedies suffered while we sleep in our comfortable beds.

If Weegee’s harsh intrusions upon private suffering – his ruthless shooting of a moment’s acute misery for a saleable picture – embarrass us, that is because of our intimate participation in them which their vitality and truth demand. If the rendition is unreal, their human qualities are inescapably poignant. Weegee has gone direct to life, to the tragedies as they occurred, and his pictures move us deeply. But they are not all tragedy and suffering. There is plenty of humor and social satire.

Weegee’s sharp perceptions, his dislike for and discomfort with the veneers of elegance in modern society, his imagination and his love for the city’s downtrodden come together in the pictures. Much of his humor is of a special brand and springs from his flair for bringing the incongruous together. The hobo trudging along a subway passage beneath a sign pointing to the Hotel Pennsylvania, a chambermaid looking cattishly at a pair of bejewelled dowagers at the opera, a burning building on the front of which is an advertising sign reading, “Simply Add Boiling Water” – these are typical of his flair for the juxtaposition of the incongruous.

Weegeee’s best pictures were made in New York, the city he has known and loved through years of night prowling in a battered car equipped with a radio which he kept continuously tuned to the police-call wave band. This droning voice was Weegee’s guide to the nether regions of a huge, sprawling, obstreperous and disorderly city. It led him to blood-splattered, gruesome bodies, to drownings and the anguish that rends the night air at fires, to the lineup at police headquarters, to vice raids and riots. And when crime was slack, Weegee just prowled around everlastingly looking for juicy slices of life. He visited Harlem and the Bowery, caught the raucous conviviality of Sammy’s famous dive and took childish delight in his picture of Sherman Billingsley, the Stork Club’s owner, at this Bowery bistro. He covered the circus and found the Prince of Wales there smoking a big cigar. The Sinatra craze in the Forties yielded a hilariously hair-raising set of pictures of bobby socks⁴ hysteria, and his Speed Graphic immortalized an endless variety of contemporary social phenomena.

But all that ended when Weegee got his first look at modern art and his first taste of fame. Then the innocence vanished and Weegee traded his radio prowl car for a mess of mirrors in a futile effort to make photographs look like modern art. The years of the kaleidoscope and the distortion devices have netted nothing but gimmicks. But many of the pictures shot so simply and directly and that paid him a bare living in the early years are human documents of extraordinary vitality, and a few of them belong among the great photographs of all time.

Bruce Downes

Publisher and Editor of Popular Photography magazine

TINTYPE

My typewriter is broken. I own no dictionary, and I never claimed that I could spell, and if Shakespeare, Balzac⁵ and Dostoyevsky⁶ could do it the hard way, in longhand, so can I. Not having been a drug addict, an alcoholic or a psycho, I don’t need a ghost writer.

I have no inhibitions, and neither has my camera. I have lived a full life and have tried everything. What may be abnormal to you is normal to me. If I had to live my life over again, I would do it all the same way . . . only more so.

Everything I write about is true . . . and I have the pictures, the checks, the memories and the scars to prove it.

I was born in Austria in 1899 and came to America when I was ten years old.

As hundreds of other men before him had done, my father left for America first to earn enough money to bring over the rest of the family. He had settled on the Lower East Side, where most of the immigrants had flocked, largely because their relatives and friends were already settled there. He struggled in one job after another, desperately trying to save up the passage money to pay our way over.

Once, we were all packed and ready to leave, but it proved to be a false alarm. The money my father had sent over turned out to be stage money. We didn’t know that he had sent it as a joke . . . the money looked real enough to us. On one side each bill said, “20.” On the other side was the joker . . . on the back of what looked like gorgeous twenties, the Madison Avenue boys of 1910 had printed advertisements for everything from sewing machines to phonographs. To my mother in Austria, Father had sent a dozen of these beauties . . . two hundred and forty dollars. Overjoyed, she took them to the bank in our town of Zlothev. The bank, without a question, exchanged these “throwaways” for good Austrian money. Mother bought steamship tickets for the whole flock of us and still had money left over. We were ready to leave for Hamburg, where we were to go aboard, when the bank officials came after us. They had made a mistake. The money Father had sent was phony! So we had to unpack and wait until he could send real money.

Father kept on working. By this time, he had decided that he could do better as his own boss with a pushcart⁷. When the second shipment of money came to Zlothev, it was okay, and the five of us – Mother, my three brothers and yours truly, Weegee – could leave by first-class steerage.

At Ellis Island⁸, which seemed the most beautiful place in the world to me, the immigration health officers examined us closely. They especially checked our eyes. One kind man gave me a banana and an orange. I didn’t know what to do with them; I had never seen a banana or an orange in Zlothev. The man carefully peeled the banana for me. I did the eating myself. It tasted good . . . like what, I don’t know, but good. I figured that if a banana was to be peeled, so was an orange, and peeled that myself. The orange, too, tasted good.

Father was waiting to meet us. He showed the authorities enough money to convince them that we would not become public charges . . . I think it was twenty dollars . . . and then took us to our first home in New York, a rear tenement house on Pitt Street near Rivington.

The two rooms over a bakery were as hot as a furnace in hell. The rent was twelve dollars a month, but in those days who had that kind of money?

Soon my father’s pushcart came in handy as we moved to another cold-water tenement⁹, this time to Cherry and Jackson Streets, near the waterfront. We had three rooms on the fifth floor – walk up. There was one hall toilet for four families. For toilet paper, we kids tore up Hearst’s¹⁰ Journal . . . it had the best comics, the Katzenjammer Kids, Abe Kabbible, Happy Hooligan¹¹; also Arthur Brisbane¹², whose daily front page editorials hammered away at the fact that a gorilla could lick the then-champion prize fighter of the world. (Who cared?) But there was no rent to pay, for my folks became the janitors. They cleaned and scrubbed the stairs, they put out the garbage, and they fought with the tenants for the landlord’s rent money, which was never ready on time.

Many a night I was so hungry that I cried myself to sleep on an empty stomach.

That fall, like the other immigrant kids, I was put into the greenhorn class at the public school to learn English. Since I knew only Polish and German, the other kids jeered at me: “Greenhorn! Greenhorn!” After two years with the unclassified children, I was admitted to a regular classroom, Grade 5 A.

I liked that school. It opened up the world of books to me, that is, as soon as I had a smattering of the language. But my escape from reality, the reality of cold and hunger, really came through the books that I borrowed from the public library. Though I shared my cot with a younger brother, I always took the side against the wall. By the light of a candle burning on the windowsill, I could read far into the night.

Even in those days, I was one of the night people. We lived next door to the public school but I just couldn’t get up in the morning. When I heard the school bell ringing, I jumped out of bed, dressed quickly and dashed to class . . . no breakfast. Lunchtime, I returned home. My mother had a light, warm lunch for me and, also, a penny for a piece of candy.

I liked my teachers. I thought they were the most wonderful people I had ever seen. In my eyes, they really taught, and I was eager to learn. However, when the teacher assigned homework, I always scribbled the answers down right away, even before school was over. That way I had no homework to take with me.

I had better things to do after school. I went around selling newspapers. However, I had no luck because so few people in our neighborhood could read English. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t make a go of it. I tried my best to do like Horatio Alger¹³, who as a newsboy went from rags to riches. But I soon came to the conclusion that Horatio must have been a phony. No one could have been so pure in heart. So I stopped reading about Horatio Alger and turned to Nick Carter¹⁴. The famous detective became my new hero and, after a week as a newsboy, I switched to selling candy.

I went to the wholesale confectioners where the candy stores bought their supplies and asked for a couple of dollars of candy on credit. I got Hershey Almond Bars, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum, Greenfield’s Sponge Candy, Tootsie Rolls, etc.

Thereafter, I made a profit of one to two dollars a day selling candy. I would start off making the rounds of the rag sweatshops right after school. Lucky for me, the girls, who made only five dollars a week themselves, always seemed to have a penny for a chocolate bar or a stick of chewing gum . . . at least, they were willing to buy from me. Sometimes I gave the girls candy on credit. At the end of the week they always paid up, and I could settle with the wholesalers. I made 100% profit . . . when I didn’t eat too much of the candy myself.

After the sweatshops I stationed myself at the elevated station¹⁵ at the Third Avenue “L” at Bowery and Grand. Often I was chased by the special cops of the elevated because the candy stands up on the platforms considered me unfair competition. But I always came back. I stayed on until I had sold out my stock, at about eight o’clock at night, and then proudly went home to hand over my money, in pennies and nickels, to my mother.

My earnings, small as they were, helped to keep the family in food and in second-hand clothes, for, except for the free rent, my father was doing poorly as a wage earner. He was very pious and would not work on the Sabbath. Therefore, it was hard for him to hold a steady job. However, as a pushcart peddler he could be his own boss. For fifty cents he could rent a pushcart from a stable, and he could also get his merchandise on credit. Before the Passover holidays, he stocked up with dishes, since each Jewish housewife needed a new set of dishes for the holidays. Carting the heavy load of dishes and even finding a good street corner was an ordeal for him. He tried so hard, but he was never a businessman at heart. (As we grew up, Father went back to the synagogue and fulfilled his lifetime ambition by becoming a rabbi, which was quite an honor for the family.)

Our rooms were freezing cold in the winter and roasting hot in the summer. To get away from the heat, we kids used to sleep on the fire escape. That was all right until it began to rain. Then back we had to go to the sweltering rooms. Waiting for us were the bedbugs. They had the last laugh and the last bite.

We had a quarter gas meter. Since most of the time we had no quarters, we used to drop in lead quarters, which were exchanged for real quarters when the collector came around. Many immigrants, when they first arrived in these tenements, used to blow out the gas light¹⁶ instead of turning off the jet, and many died that way of carbon monoxide poisoning. The neighbors cautioned us all never, never to blow out the gas flame.

If one wanted the luxury of a bath, there were the free public baths where one would get a towel and soap for two pennies and a nickel deposit for the towel. In the hot summer days, on the way home from work, I often went to the public bath on Monroe Street. The place was usually jammed with people waiting on the benches for their turns in the bathrooms. The overflow lined up outside. Because the baths shut at eight, the attendants, eager to close on time, used to double us up in the shower room. They would bang on the doors to hurry us. Normally, one could stay in about a half-hour, but before closing time we were allowed no more than ten minutes.

Friday was family day at the baths. (There were two sections: one for men, the other for women.) The families, flocking together, brought their own towels and soap. There were also the bathhouses called mikvehs, which were privately owned and charged twenty-five cents each. These baths had tubs and, also, separate days for men and women. When a boy became engaged to a girl, the girl’s father, and often the girl’s brothers, too, would take the prospective bridegroom to the mikveh and look him over, to see if he was man enough physically to raise a family.

I was fourteen years old and in Grade 7 A when I told the school principal that I was quitting school and wanted my working papers. She pleaded with me to finish public school. But I didn’t care to stretch out the agony for another year and a half. We were desperately in need, and I had to go to work, but quick.

By this time, I had had my picture taken by a street tintype¹⁷ photographer, and had been fascinated by the result. (I think I was what you might call a “natural- born” photographer, with hypo – the chemicals used in the darkroom – in my blood.)

That street photographer really started the wheels going around in my brain. I sent off to a Chicago mail-order house for a tintype outfit, and as soon as it came, began to take street tintypes myself.

After several months, I got my first job with a commercial photographer on Grand Street. Here, in a real studio, with a skylight, I thought that I could learn more about photography. The photographers specialized in pictures of items that were too heavy for travelling salesman to carry around, such as chandeliers, brass beds, pianos, glassware, dishes, overstuffed sofas, tables, shrouds, caskets, and even cemetery stones. The latter were photographed on location at the cemetery.

That place looked more like a morgue than a photo studio. All day long, I helped to set up the huge brass beds under the skylight. I polished the chandeliers. I stuffed the shrouds with crumpled paper to give them a life-like appearance and provide the undertakers with nice samples for their clients. Our biggest customer for casket pictures used a motto: “Happiness in Every Box.” Only black-and-white film was available; for the customer who wanted color photographs, there were women artists to add color tinting by hand.

The studio also photographed factory fires. Such pictures were used by the owners in filing their insurance claims. My job was to lug the heavy 8 x 10 view camera (there were no miniature cameras in those days) and the tripod, to set up the camera, and to blow the flash powder¹⁸. I would put a tube into my mouth and blow the flash powder onto a rag soaked in alcohol, which would ignite the powder. It would go off like a bomb and illuminate the scene.

Every day to work I wore a white shirt, reasonably clean, with a hard Arrow collar¹⁹ and tie, and knickers. My mother gave me a couple of sandwiches and fifteen cents, ten cents for carfare and a nickel for a pint of milk. Many mornings, when there was no money, I had to take my alarm clock to the pawnshop. I hocked it for half a dollar. On pay day, I always redeemed that clock. Big Ben spent more time in the hock shop than with me.

I used to envy the other employees when, at lunch time, they would go to the corner saloon and, for the price of a nickel beer, get a hot free lunch . . . soup, meat sandwiches, etc. Me being in knee pants, I wasn’t allowed into the saloon. A coffee break had not yet been invented.

Besides helping the photographer from eight in the morning till six in the evening, I ran his errands, dried prints, swept up, and did whatever else had to be done. Many a night at closing time the boss passed out bags of nickel hard-rock candy, and laughingly said, “You, you’re working tonight. This candy will make you lose your appetite.” Often we got the candy on Sundays, too. No extra pay either.

One payday, I opened my pay envelope and, in addition to the usual four dollars and fifty cents, I found an extra dollar. Overjoyed, I celebrated by buying myself a dollar Ingersoll watch. Then I borrowed a pair of long pants from one of my brothers, put it on over my knickers, and went to Miner’s Burlesque²⁰ on the Bowery. This was living.

The next week my pay envelope contained only four dollars and fifty cents. Thinking there was some mistake, I asked the boss, “Where’s my raise?” He replied, grinning, “That was no raise. That was accumulated overtime.” That dollar was “accumulated overtime” for two years’ work.

The big star of the studio was the camera operator. He wore a bow tie and received twenty-five dollars a week, big money in those days. After I had been there about two years, he left, and I began to do his work. My salary was raised to seven dollars a week.

I worked as a camera operator for a few weeks, and then said to the boss, “Look, my work is just as good as the other guy’s, if not better. I should get at least twelve dollars and fifty cents a week.” He said: “No! Take it or leave it!” I told him where he could shove his job and quit.

KIDNAPPER

²¹