Weegee and Naked City

Defining Moments in Photography

by Anthony W. Lee, Richard W. Meyer

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and his 1945 photography book, Naked City ―with its lurid tabloid-style images of Manhattan crime, crowds, and boisterous nightlife―changed prevailing journalistic practices almost overnight. In this volume, two art historians, Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer, bring markedly different outlooks on photography and modernism to their discussions of Weegee and his book. Meyer looks carefully at Weegee's pictures before and after they were collected and assesses how his practice of tabloid photography was inseparable from his own lowbrow appeal. Lee paints the vivid details of a leftist journalism world in 1930s and 1940s New York and shows how this world helped shape the photographer's vision. These essays restore the Naked City photographs to the mass circulation newspapers and magazines for which they were intended, and they trace the strange process by which the most famous of these pictures―suffused with blood, gore, and sensational crime―entered the museum.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is certainly no surprise that Weegee was a brash, driven photographer. His photographs are fearless and sensational, and maintain shock value, theatricality, and even humanism. This pair of essays illuminates the role of publishing and politics in the career of a man who got an auteur imprint along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock as a film director (my point, not the art historians). Weegee used his role as a photojournalist, but also used his ability to walk a line between art and tabloid journalism. It says a lot that Weegee's pics could be used for a variety of purposes, for anguished faces or a bloody corpse could be in the papers and then on book covers or museum walls. Lee's essay focuses on the working class milieu of Weegee's work and life (he appears to have lived in fleabag apartments, stoking the myth). It put him in the company of left leaning publications (his primary employer, PM, was an admirably progressive publication), even if Weegee himself was mostly in it for himself. It's a great peek into New York and photo history.

[Mary Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was supposed to read this for my History of Photography class last semester but got too busy, but I'm glad I went back and read through it. Two really great essays, and Weegee is such a good character and well worth studying if you're interested in early 20th century new york.