“Boy Arrested” is one of more than 200 photographs by Weegee currently on view at Paris’s Musée Maillol (through Oct. 15). “Weegee—The Berinson Collection” records the rise of the first 20th-century paparazzo, who scoured New York City in search of candid photo opportunities. During the 1930s and ’40s, his snapshots of gangster murders, scandals and citizen arrests garnished New York’s tabloids and broadsheets. “Weegee brought media photography to a height,” says Cynthia Young, assistant curator at New York’s International Center of Photography, which owns more than 20,000 Weegee photos. “He was a master of flash photography of the noir genre.” Indeed, Weegee inhabited New York’s underworld at the time of the Great Depression, Prohibition and the gangster wars and was friend to cop and mobster alike. “The sidewalk was his beat,” says Olivier Lorquin, director of the Musée Maillol and co-curator of the exhibition. “It’s where he learned his trade.”
Born Usher Fellig in 1899 in Ukraine, Weegee fled the pogroms with his family and settled on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. At the age of 12, he left his impoverished home to become an assistant to a photographer who took pictures of children on ponies. In 1924, Weegee took a job with the Acme Newspictures agency as a darkroom technician. By 1935, he had worked his way up to photo-reporter.
Life was cheap, and so was death; on display is a check stub from a New York magazine paying Weegee $35 for capturing “two murders.” The enterprising photographer drove around in his “Weegee mobile”—a Chevrolet turned mobile photo lab—looking for trouble. “If nothing’s stirring and my elbow don’t itch—and that’s not a gag, it really does itch when something is going to happen—I go on back to my room across from Police Headquarters and wait,” he wrote in 1937. Weegee had access to shortwave police radio; he once explained he adopted his self-mocking nickname because he showed up at crime scenes within minutes, “as if propelled by a Ouija board.”
Yet his photos can have a stylized, darkly humorous feel. “Mail Early for Delivery Before Christmas (1940)” depicts a corpse lying near a mailbox and a cop taking notes—as if he were writing a letter to Santa. When local gangster Harry Maxwell was murdered the next year, Weegee arrived too late to get the scoop. Instead he snapped another photographer pointing his flash at the scene and called it “Harry Maxwell Shot Dead in a Car (1941).”
Weegee’s photos also capture the heartbeat of another black-and-white New York: one divided by race. They show party girls in Harlem, sunbathers at Coney Island and Italian kids setting off fire hydrants on the Lower East Side. His poignant photos of Harlem dwellers celebrating Easter contrast starkly with those of a movie theater split by a “racial wall,” and bear testimony to the ritual humiliation of life in a segregated society.
Today Weegee, who died in 1968, is considered one of the most ingenious American photographers of the 20th century, alongside Diane Arbus and Alfred Stieglitz. By 1945 he had become a cult figure, publishing a best-selling collection of his New York photographs called “Naked City.” “The city owned his soul,” says Lorquin. “His favorite subjects were its people.” And from Frank Sinatra to a nameless transvestite pickpocket, the papa of paparazzi snapped them all.
