Weegee

Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island

July 21, 1940/printed 2020

Arthur Fellig, who later assumed the pseudonym Weegee, was a photographer and photojournalist, best known for his gritty black-and-white imagery taken on the streets of New York City. Born in 1899 in what is now the Ukraine, he arrived in the United States with his family in 1909, and settled in Brooklyn. After working in a variety of photography-related jobs, he struck out on his own at the age of 35 as a self-taught freelance photographer, selling his work to publications like the Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the Post, and the Sun. Weegee worked mostly at night, usually around Manhattan Police Headquarters. He was the only freelancer in New York to obtain permission to install a police radio in his car. As a result, he was often the first to arrive at the scene of the many crimes he photographed, often before the police themselves had responded. Moreover, he traveled with a makeshift darkroom in the trunk of his car, so he could produce, and then sell, his images faster than his competitors. But crime was not his only subject. He also photographed socialites at high-society events, circus performers, street life, tenement housing conditions, and many other facets of New York life. For a number of years he traveled extensively in Europe, and worked for the London Daily Mirror. He later returned to New York City, where he died in 1968. Th Museum of Modern Art began collecting his work in 1943, and featured it in several exhibitions. His work was also shown at the New York Photo League, and the International Center of Photography hosted a retrospective of his work in 1998. He has been featured in exhibitions at European venues such as the Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria's Flatz Museum, and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Several monographs of his work have been published.