Ebook: Weegee

From the photographer who created and made world-famous the “human photo story,” the man whose camera showed us New York as a “Naked City,” focusing on the unguarded face, the raw emotion at the heart of what was happening—here are 112 photographs, the very best of his work, taken between 1930 and 1965.

Here are the flower vendors, the sallow victims of Murder, Inc., the sweltering Coney Island crowds, the night club performers, the New Year's Eve revelers from Times Square to Park Avenue, the stars and fans of the Hollywood Babylon he saw and immortalized—photographs that appeared in the Herald Tribune, the Times, PM, and the Daily News through 35 years.

He was the consummate city kid, growing up on the Lower East Side, leaving school at 14, leaving home (“It was impossible to find work. I slept in the parks, in missions, and anywhere else I could find a place to lie down”), working as a candy peddler, a busboy at the Automat, and, finally, landing a job in the darkroom of the Acme News Service where he worked for 12 years, all through his 20s (“Here was the kind of photography I was looking for: no more retouching wrinkles and removing double chins”). And he was the quintessential newspaper photographer (the crumpled fedora, the slept-in clothes, the cigar plugged in his mouth), the only civilian with a police radio in his car (and a portable darkroom in his trunk). For 10 years he covered a murder a night—from midnight until dawn, photographing the people of his city (“I found out that life is like a time-table.... At about five o'clock is the time for tragic things!”).

As surely as he understood the inside of his camera, whose lenses he himself designed, he understood the hack (but delicate) technique of selling his work. For the Tribune, everything had to be different, to spare the readers. Vogue had to have “an abstract so nobody could figure out what it was. With PM, anything went....”

Chosen from more than 5,000, these photographs represent the best of his New York and Hollywood work. Louis Stettner, who selected the photographs and is the author of the introductory essay, was Weegee’s €losest friend for 20 years. “During the years of our friendship,” he writes, “I saw him as a ribald clown, a guttural egomaniac, a bawdy sensualist, a shy, silent observer of murder, and a passionate humanist.” Weegee’s technical mastery and stunning personal style, his genius with the newspaper photo, his evident enjoyment of people (and his faith in them), make the photographs collected in this book as exciting, moving, and extraordinary as they were when they first captured the life they so vividly reveal.