Merry Christmas

Weegee: The man

Black and White.

It tears down the pretty colors and shows up the shadows. It makes history factual, inquiries interesting, and death loses the gruesome flavor when blood is just another shade of reality.
























Weegee, aka Arthur Fellig, made B&W sing, and gave homage to the human condition with every pop of the flashbulb.
















As quoted from the NY Times:
"Born Usher Fellig in 1899, in an eastern province of Austria, he came with his family through Ellis Island (where his name was Americanized to Arthur) to the Lower East Side in 1910. He left home as a teenager and began working as an assistant to a street photographer who shot tintypes of children on a pony. Through the 1920s he worked as a darkroom assistant at The New York Times and Acme Newspictures, which was later absorbed by U.P.I. Photos."




















Eventually, he would be the toast of Manhattan and a world renown artist, book writer, and exhibitor of 'art'.



















But first, there were the years of being a hard working schlub on the lower east side.Weegee lived in a single room at 5 Centre Market Place from the mid-1930s to 1947, a drab block of tenements inhabited by reporters and photographers who worked the crime beat. No. 4, known as “the shack,” was their main hangout. Frank Lava’s gunsmith shop, with its wooden revolver sign, was at No. 6. Weegee lived over the John Jovino Gun Shop at 5.























Living in a single room- existing really- he waited for the next big thing, the next small movement, the next police call, knock on the door, celebrity event, or the sound of gunfire.

“Crime was my oyster,” Weegee wrote in his 1961 memoir, “Weegee by Weegee.” “I was friend and confidant to them all. The bookies, madams, gamblers, call girls, pimps, con men, burglars and jewel fencers.” For his behind-bars portraits of famous gangsters like Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, Waxey Gordon and Mad Dog Coll, colleagues called him “the official photographer for Murder, Inc.”

Life and Times

The neighborhood he lived in was diverse, to say the least.





















In Weegee’s day culture clashes between the haves and the have-nots happened at Sammy’s Bowery Follies (267 Bowery, between East Houston and Stanton Streets), which from 1934 to 1970 attracted what The New York Times once described as a mixed crowd of “drunks and swells, drifters and celebrities, the rich and the forgotten.”

Sammy's was the place Weegee celebrated both his books being published as well as other major events.

Weegee (who disparaged The Times as a paper for the “well-off Manhattan establishment”) called Sammy’s “the poor man’s Stork Club” and wrote in the newspaper PM in 1944: “There’s no cigarette girl — a vending machine puts out cigarettes for a penny apiece. There’s no hatcheck girl — patrons prefer to dance with their hats and coats on. But there is a lulu of a floor show.”



Norma Devine is Sammy's Mae West, December 4, 1944

Bowery Savings Bank, December 4, 1944






















Among the regulars, he wrote in his 1945 book, “Naked City,” was a woman they called Pruneface and a midget who walked the streets dressed as a penguin to promote cigarettes. When the midget got drunk, Weegee wrote, he “offered to fight any man his size in the house.”
























in 1946 at the party for Weegee’s second book, “Weegee’s People.” Pretty uptown blondes and dowagers in pearls mingle with toothless crones and panhandlers, as models parade in their foundation garments, and a man with a flea circus puts his tiny performers through their paces.

The club, long gone, now is the site of a less eccentric clientele.



















X

The proprietor of a cafe at 10 Prince Street, where a coffee shop is today, was smoking a cigarette outside on the evening of Nov. 16, 1939, when an unknown gunman shot him dead. When Weegee arrived moments later, the body was still lying in the doorway, and the fire escapes of all the tenements on the block, which remain largely unchanged today, were crowded with gawkers. He captioned the photograph “Balcony Seats at a Murder.”

Kentucky Suitcase

From art daily.org

via

WEEGEEWEEGEEWEEGEE.blogspot.com

INDIANAPOLIS.- The Indianapolis Museum of Art announced today that it has received a gift of 210 photographs by acclaimed artist Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) as well as nearly 100 documents relating to his life.

The collection, which is believed to have belonged at one time to Weegee's long-time companion Wilma Wilcox, contains photographs spanning Weegee's career and portraying all aspects of his idiosyncratic subject matter.


Also included are numerous portraits of the artist, and various ephemera such as letters and postcards from Weegee to Wilma, newspaper clippings, press passes, and even Weegee's Social Security card.

The collection is a partial gift of Steven H. Nowlin, and a partial purchase by the Caroline Marmon Fesler Fund and the Alliance of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.


The Weegee collection, considered second only to that from the artist’s estate at the I C P in New York, was discovered in a trunk at a farmhouse yard sale in southern Kentucky in 2003 and acquired by Indianapolis historic documents dealer Steve H. Nowlin the same year.

It includes works ranging from crime photographs, Harlem in the 1940s, audiences at jazz concerts or in darkened movie theaters taken surreptitiously with infrared film, strippers, transvestites, Greenwich Village in the 1950s, and distortions of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor, Picasso, Eisenhower, Jackie Kennedy, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.




Kentucky Yard Sale Yields a Trove of Weegee Images

By RANDY KENNEDY June 3, 2008
Correction Appended

"As letters go, they aren’t exactly the stuff of literature. One from 1959 asks that the recipient phone Con Edison and complain about an unusually high electric bill ($54.92). Another requests a shipment of beloved New York cigars because of apparent dissatisfaction with the options available in Europe. At least one, written from the Regina-Palast Hotel in Munich, Room 551, starts to provide a hint of the sender.




“Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time,” the letter explains. “It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks.”
The letters, along with 210 vintage black-and-white photographic prints, were found in 2003 in a zebra-stripe trunk that was bought at a yard sale in Kentucky by two Indiana women who were on their way back from a camping trip. One of the women simply liked the look of the trunk, and when she found old clothes, yellowed papers and pictures inside, she thought about throwing the contents away.




But she took them instead to an Indianapolis rare-documents dealer. And this week the Indianapolis Museum of Art plans to announce that it has acquired a trove of work and correspondence by Weegee, the crepuscular, stogie-smoking New York photographer whose visceral pictures became a template not only for artists like Diane Arbus but also for much of the uncomfortably close tabloid imagery that exists today. The museum described the acquisition as a partial gift and partial purchase from the dealer.



The trunk is assumed to have once been the possession of Wilma Wilcox, a social worker who was Weegee’s companion and lived with him from 1957 until his death in 1968. Upon her death in 1993, she bequeathed the bulk of his work — thousands of prints and negatives — to the I C P in Manhattan. How the trunk full of prints and 62 letters to Ms. Wilcox from Weegee (born Usher Fellig in what is now Ukraine, and later known as Arthur Fellig) ended up in Kentucky is a mystery that neither the Indianapolis Museum nor the dealer, Steve H. Nowlin, has solved.
The items include photographs spanning his career, as well as letters, postcards, newspaper clippings, Weegee’s press passes and even his Social Security card. And there are about three dozen portraits of Weegee taken by others, including photographers Philippe Halsman and Simon Nathan.



“We’re just lucky that it all survived,” said Martin Krause, the museum’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “The woman who found them thought maybe these were just old family snapshots or something — though how you could mistake a Weegee for a family photograph, I don’t know.”
“People who work in the daytime are suckers,” he once said. Before the publication of his first book, “Naked City,” made him famous in 1945, he lived in a cheap room near police headquarters and was said to be so accustomed to working on the run that he once developed a picture of a prizefight in a subway motorman’s cab while rushing back to a newspaper office.
As his star rose in the 1950s and 1960s, he began to travel extensively, make experimental films and worked for other directors, some as illustrious as Stanley Kubrick, for whom he served as a consultant during the filming of “Dr. Strangelove.”
But as many of the newly discovered letters to Ms. Wilcox show, much of his film career was on a lower plane. The letter from Munich refers to his work on a 1958 quasi-documentary called “Windjammer,” the story of an epic sea journey filmed in something called Cinemiracle, a short-lived widescreen format. (In fact, very short-lived: “Windjammer” was the only movie to be shot with that method.)

Nowlin said one series of photographs came from an exhibit of paintings by Pablo Picasso in London that the artist attended. “Weegee befriended him and took pictures of Picasso, and distorted pictures of Picasso’s distorted pictures.”





The murder site today:
10 Prince St. New York, N.Y. ca. 1939

10 Prince St. New York, N.Y. March 03, 2008

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His room at 5 Center Market Place, with a visitor, Gordon "Moon" Mullins...





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Scene of the Crime: Images at the Getty 2005-2006

	Cop Killer
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, New York City, 1941; print, about 1950 Gelatin silver print 13 1/4 x 10 9/16 in. 84.XM.190.30

Their First Murder
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, New York City, October 9, 1941; print, about 1950 Gelatin silver print 10 1/8 x 11 in. 86.XM.4.6

This picture was originally published with the headline "Brooklyn School Children See Gambler Murdered in Street," and this caption: "Pupils were just leaving P.S. 143 when a small-time gambler, pulled up at a traffic light a block from the school. Up to the car stepped a waiting gunman, who fired twice and escaped through the throng of children..." The image is a good example of how flash changes the scene, casting background detail into generalized darkness.

Fire Alarm / A Couple Driven out from the Burning Tenement
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, April 23, 1944 Gelatin silver print 13 3/8 x 10 9/16 in. 84.XM.190.46

Weegee points out in his book Naked City (1945) that his fire pictures were not only destined for the news media but were also useful as evidence "for the detectives and fire marshals who are always on the scene...on the look out for pyromaniacs" and to end disputes about who actually made the rescues, since "different firemen will take credit." The publication PM ran this image nearly full page on April 23, 1944, with details about how the city's Emergency Welfare Division assisted citizens who were burned out of their homes.

Couple Kissing in a Bar
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, negative, about 1942; print, about 1950 Gelatin silver print 13 1/8 x 10 1/2 in. 84.XM.862.4

Weegee never let an embrace escape his camera. At least that would appear to be the case based on the enormous number of kissing couples found in his archive after his death and their appearance in publications of his work, from a section in Naked City (1945) called "Lovemaking on the Beach," to a 1947 Look magazine article on contemporary American morals, to the posthumous book, The Village (1989), which features an abundance of young lovers.

When Weegee wanted to shoot "people doing things they never would do if they thought I was watching them," he would often use a triangular prism lens attachment to "see around corners."

The Critic
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, November 22, 1943 Gelatin silver print 10 1/8 x 12 15/16 in. 84.XP.459.11

The Critic, presenting Mrs. George W. Kavanaugh, her friend Lady Decies, and a bystander brought by Weegee from a Bowery bar, became one of the photographer's best-known works. Life magazine cropped the picture to eliminate the "plain people" at left in its November 22, 1943, coverage of the fall Metropolitan Opera opening.

Songstress at Sammy's / Dora
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, April 16, 1944 Gelatin silver print 13 9/16 x 10 9/16 in. 2003.99.9

Sammy Fuchs, founder of Sammy's on the Bowery in New York City, offered entertainment as well as drink. There, Dora, Billie Dauscha, Mabel Sidney, and others performed, singing "sentimental songs," as Weegee referred to them, for an audience that usually ranged from uptown swells to flophouse residents.

Customers of all types flocked to Sammy's as it gained a reputation for being what Weegee called "the poor man's Stork Club," an alternative to that highbrow nightclub. Weegee devoted a section titled "The Bowery" to Sammy's in his book Naked City (1945); Fuchs, in turn, hosted a raucous publication party for the author.

At the Concert in Harlem
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, negative, before 1946; print, about 1950 Gelatin silver print 13 7/16 x 10 11/16 in. 86.XM.4.8

When Weegee compiled his second book, Weegee's People (1946), he concentrated on the social life of New Yorkers and chose many Harlem images, including this one. The book's extensive "Saturday Night" section contains pictures of dancers, performers, and partygoers enjoying themselves in nightclubs, bars, and dance halls.

Perhaps made at the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue, a popular venue for musicians like Duke Ellington, or the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, a great success with black and white audiences, this composition displays Weegee's trademark use of the unconscious gesture.

The Fountain / Face of the Villiage [sic]
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, about 1955 Gelatin silver print 9 1/4 x 7 in. 94.XM.14.4

Weegee claimed that Greenwich Village was for him what the Montmartre section of Paris had been for the French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He photographed this downtown community of artists, writers, and radicals for decades and compiled a book dummy of selected images, which was issued posthumously in 1989 as The Village.

Weegee's opening statement to the book reflects his reasons for recording the neighborhood: "I continually photographed the Village...compiling a memento of a place that seemed to be fast disappearing. New York University is tearing down all the old buildings and putting up more classrooms so they can teach Ceramics, Square Dancing, and primitive Painting à la Grandma Moses."

Billie Dauscha and Mabel Sidney, Bowery Entertainers
	© International Center of Photography
	Weegee American, New York City, December, 1944; print, about 1950 Gelatin silver print 13 1/8 x 10 9/16 in. 84.XM.190.34 Weegee, New York © Estate of Lisette Model, courtesy Baudoin Lebon/Keitelman Lisette Model American, 1945 Gelatin silver print 13 7/16 x 10 5/8 in. 84.XM.153.75 HEAR Weegee Speak: http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/weegee/moniker_audio.html http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/weegee/darkrooms_audio.html http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/weegee/chinatown_audio.html http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/weegee/pie_audio.html http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/weegee/murders_audio.html http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/weegee/mugger_audio.html

In Focus: Weegee Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum Judith Keller

Stalking the streets of New York City at night alongside police detectives and barflies, the tough-talking, fedora-wearing, cigar-smoking photographer who called himself "Weegee" was ready at a moment's notice with his Speed Graphic to respond to the police radio. From the mid-1930s to 1950s he captured hundreds of pictures of accidents, murders, arrests, fires, and natural disasters, producing works that are both empathetic and sensational. This volume in the In Focus series presents approximately fifty of the ninety-five Weegee prints in the Getty Museum's collection, surveying the photographer's probing vision of life in New York—from Harlem to Times Square, Greenwich Village, and the Bowery. Each of the photographs is accompanied by an introduction, a chronology, and commentary.

The book also includes an edited transcript of a colloquium on Weegee's life and work that incorporates the author's comments along with those of seven other participants: David Featherstone, Michael Hargraves, Weston Naef, Miles Orvell, Ira Richer, Colin Westerbeck, and Cynthia Young.

In Focus: Weegee was published to coincide with an exhibition of the photographer's work at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles that was on view from September 20, 2005, through January 22, 2006.

Judith Keller is curator of photographs at the Getty Museum.

Fires

The Gordon Archive houses a huge collection of original WeeGee shots.





The tonal quality of these negatives are, for the most part, quite stunning. All the more so when you realize that many were developed in the trunk of his car! Sadly, the lack of washing facilities and shortcuts taken to make deadlines have left many of them stained and discolored with mineral and chemical deposits. Many have also suffered from poor storage and mechanical damage. Where possible I have tried to include the entire negative including the damaged areas. A number of the negatives have grease pencil marks indicating the preferred cropping. On these I have also kept the entire image ignoring cropping marks in the hope that this will aid research. Some negatives, like the Chicago series (#64-#69) were cropped with black tape that can no longer be safely removed.

(From WEEGEEWEEGEEWEEGEE.blogspot.com:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weegee
"He maintained a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car, to expedite getting his free-lance product to the newspapers."

This is not exactly true.
It's funny that this myth is perpetuated, since one of the most famous pictures of Weegee is him sitting at the trunk of his car and typing while holding a flashlight... Clearly visible are boxes of cigars and flash bulbs, and film holders, two Speed Graphic cameras, and a pair of boots, but no film processing equipment, no enlargers or trays of developer, stop bath, fix, etc...

On the less-accurate-than-Wikipedia Temple University photographer's web page about Weegee there is the above image, with the caption: "Weegee used the trunk of his car as a darkroom.")

On page 52 of Weegee by Weegee, Weegee writes:

"My car became my home. It was a two-seater, with a special extra-large luggage compartment. I kept everything there, an extra camera, cases of flash bulbs, extra loaded holders, a typewriter, fireman's boots, boxes of cigars, salami, infra-red film for shooting in the dark, uniforms, disguises, a change of underwear, and extra shoes and socks."

Salem Massachusetts burns, 1914





PARIS FRANCE, New 45 metre ladder


Fifth alarm, Sacred Heart School Brooklyn
Mayor La Guardia & Chief Mc Elligott


12/13/39
1179 51st Street, Brooklyn

Visit the 200+ shots at the website.

Subject Dies

Read entire story and several obits at:
http://weegeeweegeeweegee.blogspot.com/2008/04/apes-men-and-morons.html

Sherry Britton, burlesque performer and subject of a great Weegee photo, and subject of a series of photos that begin with Sherry Britton performing, then backstage, then outside the theater, then she drives away in the back of a taxi, has died, aged 89.

Here is most of an obituary from the Daily News:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/04/02/2008-04-02_burlesque_legend_sherry_britton_dies.html
Burlesque legend Sherry Britton dies
BY OWEN MORITZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, April 2nd 2008, 7:03 PM
Sherry Britton, a brainy, sexy stripper who was the queen of Broadway burlesque in her 20s, was barred from the World's Fair in her 40s and graduated from college in her 60s, has died.
"She had an IQ of 165, lived on Gramercy Park and aged gracefully," said a cousin, Karen Britton.
Britton, dubbed Great Britton and once made an honorary brigadier general by President Roosevelt for her work entertaining World War II troops, died Tuesday in Beth Israel Hospital of natural causes. She was 89.

Tabloid Death

From WeeGee site, no official attributions.









Wee recently found this Eye - "I" - witness account of the Fifth Ave. gun battle and mayhem caused by the brothers William and Anthony Esposito in True magazine, Vol. 8, Number 47, April 1941. The story is an eye witness account by John McCarthy.

Some Interesting Shots

This is one of several versions of this shot:









4. Nazi in Yorkville, who ran for Congress, was committed to Bellevue, c. 1941
$1,875
gelatin silver print
titled in ink and '5 Center Market Place' copyright credit stamps (on the verso)
13½ x 10½in. (34.2 x 26.5cm.)



3. Hedda Hopper, 1948
$2,500
gelatin silver print
'ABC Press', 'Atlantic Press' and 'Weegee from Photo-Representatives' copyright credit stamps (on the verso)
9½ x 7¾in. (24 x 19.6cm.)




2. All Night Mission, Bowery, 1940
$2000
gelatin silver print
'Photo by Weegee' credit stamp and agency copyright credit reproduction limitation label affixed (on the verso); exhibition label affixed (on the mat)
10¼ x 13½in. (26 x 34.2cm.)



1. The Slumber Hour, Scrubwoman at 20 Wall St. Tower, Midnight, 1945
$5,625
gelatin silver print
'Weegee from Photo-Representatives' credit stamp (on the verso)
13 5/8 x 10¾in. (34.5 x 27.2cm.)




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"MAN SLEEPING ON A FIRE ESCAPE"

Estimate: $5,000—7,000
Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: $4,375
13¾ by 10¾ in. (34.9 by 27.3 cm.)
The photographer's 'Photo-Representatives' and '6526 Selma Avenue, Hollywood 28, California' studio stamps on the reverse, matted, framed, 1943



7. Coney Island
$17,925
SALE 1039, 18 APRIL 2002
Gelatin silver print. 1940/1940s. Reproduction limitation stamp on the verso.
7½ x 9½in. (19 x 24.2cm.)





6. Mother and Child in Harlem, 1943
$18,750
SALE 2076, 17 OCTOBER 2007
gelatin silver print
titled 'Negroes Moving into Wight [sic] Neighborhood' in an unknown hand in pencil, 'Weegee the Famous' and 'Photo-Representatives' credit stamps (on the
verso)
13 3/8 x 10 5/8in. (33.9 x 27 cm.)





5. Their First Murder (ca. 1936)
$23,000
SALE 7902, 21 APRIL 1994
Gelatin silver print.
1945.
Weegee The Famous; Arthur Fellig credit stamps; Popular Photography layout stamp and typed narrative text on a trimmed page affixed to the verso. 11¾ x 10 5/8in.
LOT NOTES
In response to Mr. Whiting's request to reproduce the picture offered here (see Lot 166), Weegee wrote on September 13, 1946 in a letter which accompanies the lot: Thanx for your kind letters. & excuse the delay in answering them...As I am having my teeth fixed and a new set of STORE TEETH ordered from my favorite MAIL ORDER house...You might be intested (sic) that I have changed my act once more...NOW I am doing the photos for the SCRIPPS HOWARD newspapers full page ads in papers and magazines all over the country....$$400.00 yes I said four hundred bucks for a nights work.



4. Woman Cab Driver and Macy's Clown
$25,850
SALE 9432, 12 OCTOBER 2000
Woman Cab Driver and Macy's Clown
Gelatin silver print. Circa 1942. Credit stamp on the verso.
10½ x 133/8in. (26.7 x 34cm.) Framed.




2. Naked City. New York: Essential Books, 1945.
$37,000
SALE 2110, 10 APRIL 2008
Octavo (234 x 164 mm). 239 black and white photographs. Original tan cloth, spine and front cover lettered in blue; original photo-illustrated dustjacket, printed in yellow, red and black (a few short tears, a few very small chips at extremities); cloth folding box. Weegee's signature in green ink on the title page, dated "1948".



1. Weegee, A Portfolio (1940s-50s)
$47,000
SALE 9484, 13 OCTOBER 2000
New York: Privately published, 1981. 49 gelatin silver prints, printed by Sidney Kaplan. Each with PHOTO BY WEEGEE N.Y.C. and PRINT: KAPLAN stamps on the verso. One of four complete portfolios realized from the original edition of 25.
Each approximately 163/8 x 125/8in. (41.7 x 32cm.) or the reverse.

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1. Coney Island (Joe's Penny Arcade)
$240
gelatin silver print, 'Weegee' credit stamp, titled 'Coney Island' and inscribed 'from European' in pencil (on the verso)
11¼ x 14 in. (28.4 x 35.3 cm.)
SALE 1538, 12 - 13 JULY 2005



Rent Party
Unsold
"Rent Party." Ferrotyped silver print, 7 1/4x9 1/4 inches (18.4x23.5 cm.), with a caption label and the "Estate of Peter B. Martin Sr. Collection" hand stamp on verso. Circa 1950
Estimate $1,800-2,200
From the estate of Peter B. Martin, Sr.; by agent to A Private West Coast Collection.
Weegee: The Village, unpaginated.


Empire State Building Distortion
$1,600
Lot 208
Empire State Building Distortion. Silver print, 6 3/4x5 1/4 inches (17.1x13.3 cm.), with penciled numeric notations and a "Photo by Weegee, From the Collection of Suzanne and Hugh Johnston" hand stamp on verso. 1955
Estimate $2,000-3,000


Movie Theatre Projection
$2,000
Lot 207
Movie Theatre Projection. Unique ferrotyped silver print, 8x10 inches (20.3x25.4 cm.), with 2 "Photo by Weegee, Collection of Suzanne and Hugh Johnston" hand stamps on verso and penciled notations. 1955-1957
Estimate $2,500-3,500
This unique photograph was commissioned by the Johnstons and was then subsequently gifted by Weegee to the couple. An variant "straight" version of this image appears in "Weegee''s People," 1946.


Frank Sinatra Fan at the Paramount Theatre. $2500-$3500
$2,000
"Frank Sinatra Fan at the Paramount Theatre." Ferrotyped silver print, 13 1/2x10 1/2 inches (34.5x26.7 cm.), with the "Weegee The Famous" and Photo-Representatives hand stamps on verso. 1944
Estimate $2,500-3,500
From A Private West Coast Collection.
Naked City, 119; Weegee (Stettner), 165 (variant); Weegee''s World, 207.


128: Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) Untitled (CrimeScene), ca. 1940; Gelatin silver print (framed); Stamped; 10" x 8 1/8" (sheet); Provenance: Private Collection, New York
US $2,600.00

Researching the "Gun Girl".

Researching the "Gun Girl".

"My favorite part is the passing mention of "Norma Parker, the Broadway Gun Girl," who robbed restaurants with a cap pistol. I ought to look up more information about her, or better yet, someone else should do it while I lie down".
"Weegee sometimes bribed the police to bring a perp in a different entrance, “so he’d be the only guy standing there with his camera, while everybody else was waiting around the corner,” Mr. McLoughlin said. One of his most striking perp-walk shots was of Norma Parker, a pretty young woman who in 1936 held up a number of restaurants on lower Broadway using a cap pistol, for which The Daily Mirror nicknamed her the Broadway Gun Girl."
"

BROADWAY GUN GIRL RECAPTURED IN WOOD; Norma Parker and Three Other Women Who Fled State Farm Face Longer Terms

Four women inmates of the Westfield State Farm, who escaped last night by climbing a seven-foot fence topped with barbed wire, were captured at 1:40 this afternoon in a woods three miles from the prison."

I am wondering if that caption is incorrect and maybe added later by someone.
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Wandering Flickr

Weegee Crime Scene - Chelsea Inn, W. 17th Street, Manhattan.

La femme obus 1943

Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, January 27, 1942

NYC GCS Crash

The drowning victim
Coney Island

1940´s
Weegee

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Flickr Here and There

Transvestite in a police van, 1941.

At a concert in Harlem, 1948.

Entertainers at Sammy's-on-the-Bowery, 1944-45.

Easter Sunday,Harlem

Cakebox Murder

New Year's Eve at Sammy's-on -the-Bowery, 1943.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

More Misc. Shots/ Lots of Deaths

Weegee shows Stanley Kubrick his Rolleiflex camera

Arthur Fellig (aka Weegee) and Andy Warhol

Weegee, "Joy of Living," 1942)

Victory Celebration, 1945



Distortion (Charlie Chaplin), c.1955


Morning After (nude distortion), c.1950

Friday, November 21, 2008

Just More Wonderful Things

"Car accident" 1940 - Photograph by Weegee

WEEGEE from the Berinson Collection Photography

"He will take his camera and ride off in search of new evidence that his city, even in her most drunken and disorderly and pathetic moments, is beautiful."
- William McCleery in Naked City

Jazz in the Bowery, New York c. 1940’s
© Arthur Felig (Weegee)







"Ambulance Plunges Bringing Death to Two",
August 24, 1943; 33.8 x 26.8 cm.

"Murder at the Feast of San Gennaro",
September 22, 1939; 31 x 26.4 cm.

In 1940, Weegee got a job as special contributing photographer for PM Daily, a paper created in June 1940. Now, Weegee not only had his photographs signed, but from time to time he could add text to his pictures or even write whole stories. He got exhibitions and up to the publication of his first book in 1945, Nacked City, Weegee stayed with PM Daily. His photobook was a huge success. Among Weegees favourite subjects was New York's night life, with its bars and all types of entertainment. Weegee showed New York, in all its contrasts. Classes and culturs clashed in the nightly activities, such as in the third photograph on this page, The Critic (Nobember 22, 1943). Weegee cared about the ordinary people as much as about the high society and the stars. For a short time, Weegee experimented unsuccessfully with film in Hollywood in 1948. He returned to New York in 1952. In his later years, Weegee made also experiments with manipulated photographs. Among them is a series of disfigured heads of stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Jerry Lewis.






Girl jumped out of car, and was killed, on Park Avenue (c. 1940).

This picture shows a girl who leapt from a moving car on Park Avenue. Young says that she chose it in spite of the preponderance of Weegee shots of dead bodies. “This is a version we don’t know from other exhibitions,” she said. “This is a woman who’s fallen out of a cab and it’s poignant that, well, it’s a woman.” The victim’s body is enshrouded in a sheet, but her little black pocketbook remains in plain view.

Water Main Burst Uproots Madison Avenue (1938).


Circus Audience (c. 1943).

times square 1949

Crowd At Scene Of Accident
1940s, vintage silver print
13 x 10.

WEEGEE
"Fireman"
1939, vintage silver print
12 3/4 x 10 1/2.

WEEGEE
The Human Cop
ca. 1950s, silver print, ca. 1950s
10 3/8 x 13 9/16, "Credit Photo by Weegee the Famous" stamp, "Arthur Felig, 5 Center Market Place, New York City" stamp on print verso.

WEEGEE
"Bowery Follies"
ca. 1945, silver print, ca. 1940s
8 x 10 1/2, Notations in ink and in pencil, credit stamp and Arthur Feling stamp on verso.

WEEGEE
Fire Victim
ca. 1950s, silver print, ca. 1950s
10 1/2 x 13 7/16, "Weegee, 451West 47th Street, New York City, USA, TEL: 265-1955" stamp, "Please Credit Weegee from Photo-Representatives" stamp on print verso.


Tenement fire, Harlem, 1942

Mother and daughter looking up at the top floor, where another daughter and her baby are trapped.

"There had to be a good meaty story," Weegee once said, "to get the editors to buy the pictures. A truck crash with the driver trapped inside, his face a crisscross of blood, a tenement house fire with the screaming people being carried down the aerial ladder clutching their babies, dogs, cats, canaries, parrots, monkeys, and even snakes, a just shot gangster, lying in the gutter, well-dressed in his dark suit and pearl grey hat, hot off the griddle, with a priest, who seemed to appear from nowhere, giving him the last rites, just caught stick-up men, lady burglars, etc."

Summer, The Lower East Side, 1937.

Woman with Broken Umbrella.

013

016

The Cannon Act, 1952.

King Weegee

Interview with collection founder and widow HERE.

US Hotel at 263 Bowery Street, New York, 1944




Rehearsal, Metropolitan Opera, 1943.















Outside the Metropolitan Opera House, 1943.




Night, Coney Island, 1940.

Ballerina Marina Franca in her peacock costume, April 18, 1941

Artists and Models Ball

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Fantastic Prints and Gorey Moments- And Photos of the Man Himself.

Untitled (crowd of men on sidewalk)

"Three Women Trampled to Death in Excusion-Ship Stampede"

"Three Women Trampled to Death in Excusion-Ship Stampede"
August 18, 1941

"Three Women Trampled to Death in Excusion-Ship Stampede"
August 18, 1941

[Ball]

[Ambulance attendant tagging corpse]

[Accident]
ca. 1940

Untitled (young men drinking at party)

Untitled (teen age audience)

Weegee (Arthur Fellig)

Dames! Stiffs! Mugs!

(excerpt of great article below)

Some photographers are the poets of purple mountains' majesty. Some are the poets of the placid suburbs. Weegee is the poet of small-timers who died facedown on a city pavement at 3 a.m. in a pool of their own blood. And petty mobsters. He was great at petty mobsters--half the guys in his pictures look as if their nickname was Mugsy. As one of the most unabashed tabloid-news photographers, Weegee was also supremely good at car crashes, dazed escapees from tenement fires, transvestites being hustled out of paddy wagons, and Peeping Tom shots of lovers wrestling in twos (and threes!) on the nighttime beach at Coney Island.

His prime years, from the mid-1930s to the late '40s, were the formative days of tabloid photography. The work Weegee did then makes up the better part of "Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama," the affecting and sizable (more than 200 prints) show on view at the International Center of Photography Midtown in New York City through Feb. 22. Accompanied by Weegee's World (Bulfinch; 262 pages; $75)--probably the fanciest book ever devoted to a man who generally had a cigar stuck in his mouth--the exhibit moves on later to Paris and London.

Tenement fire, 1945.






Arrested for bribing basketball players, 1942.


1940 -- Jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) waves his handkerchief as he performs.

Enlarge image

"... Cop who looks like Gary Cooper books blind man for murder"
1941

"1250 decided to continue the trip"

"Boys Caught in Boarded-up Harlem Store"
August 16, 1943

"Calypso"
ca. 1944

Untitled (car wreck, 81st & Amsterdam)

"This screaming girl has suddenly realized that the body lying under the blanket is that of her mother"

"Check for Two Murders"
ca. 1939

"Fire Destroys the 'World's Largest Railway' at Coney Island"
February 28, 1944

PHOTOGRAPH BY WEEGEE - GETTY. DIGITALLY ALTERED

"John Shafran"
1940

"The picnic's end"

"The new-born kittens were rescued too... of course."

"The blanket-covered bodies"

"Saved"

"Not waiting for the movie theatre to open...but a refugee from a fire..."

"Mrs. Bernice Lythcott and her one-year-old son Leonard look out a window through which hoodlums threw stones."

Resourceful girl manages to watch man on the flying trapeze and feed hot dog to escort at the same time (18-04-1943)

Indianapolis Museum of Art Acquires Major Weegee Photography Collection:

Zero Mostel.

Weegee(Arhur Fellig)/International Centre of Photography—Hulton Archive/Getty Images



Weegee
Untitled (Weegee photographing bridal couple)
circa 1940-1949

Ohne Titel
Medium	gelatin silver print
Size	13.1 x 10.6 in. / 33.2 x 26.8 cm.
Year	1940 - 1949

Backstage at Casino de Paris
Medium	gelatin silver print
Size	9.1 x 7.8 in. / 23 x 19.7 cm.
Year	1950 - 1959

O Sole Mio

c1940 New York

	Weegee/International Center of Photography			"

"Black Power," 1951, by Weegee

	Weegee/International Center of Photography			"Mrs. Anna Sheehan ... accused as murderess," 1937.

NEW YORK CITY, 1940 -- A father and son wave American flags at a parade in Chinatown.

Weegee/International Center of Photography

"Irma Twiss Epstein, Nurse Accused of Killing Baby," 1942.

From : latenightcoffeeshops.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_..

Coronet: Drama In The Courtroom (Coronet/April 1947)

Here is a photo feature from the April 1947 issue of Coronet magazine. It's uncredited, but I'm quite sure that some of these photos are by Arthur "Weegee" Fellig.

HOLLYWOOD, 1949 -- Actor Clark Gable (1901-1960) smokes a cigarette with an astonished friend.

BROOKLYN, SEPTEMBER 10, 1941 -- A crowd gathers to see the corpse of Peter Mancuso, shot twice by an unknown gunman as he sat parked at a traffic light. The crying woman is Mancuso's aunt and the little boy tugging the hair of the girl in front of him is her son.

Weegee Press Shot 1938 Harlem Raid

1940

NEW YORK CITY, 1945 -- Two lovers kiss in the front row at the Palace Theatre.

1940 -- A woman in a nightclub goes cross-eyed as her bubblegum bubble expands in front of her face.

Yes, indeed. How could someone possibly mistake a Weegee for a family photograph? Are we dealing with buffoons here? Do these people have no eye? Are they just plain stupid?

If you don't recognize this photo as a Weegee and not as a snapshot then please do us all a favor and shoot yourself. Or at the very least, please don't procreate. Darwin would be amazed that you've managed to survive this long.

Thanks to Mr. Martin Krause for making art people look even more ridiculous than we already do.

http://museum.icp.org/html/media_enlarged_EN.html

[Bettie Page]

Weegee
"From Gags to Riches" Barbra Streisand modeling a costume from "My Name is Barbra", 1965

Hole where plane (B-25) hit Empire State Building, 1945.


Murder in Hell’s Kitchen. Weegee, 1944.

WEEGEE, Self Portrait in Police Car, Los Angeles, ca. 1950, silver print, ca. 1950.

Issue 56, Winter 1994

Cover: Circus photo by Weegee (Arthur Fellig). All the artworks in this issue, except for the tiny Beckmann print on page 3, are photographs by Weegee, reproduced courtesy of Magnum

Le pari de XXI

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

From adski_kafeteri on Live Journal & the net

(Thank you sensen)...








This is a much better version of one from an earlier post:


















Girl who beat police matron and escaped from jail
ca. 1938












Woman in Greenwich Village cafe]
ca. 1956

Wife of the Victim





Denver R.R. Sta- 3 in morning" Print by Weegee

Eddie Condon'S Opening

Opening night at Eddie Condon's nightclub. The band (L-R) Gene Schroeder on piano, Condon on guitar, Joe Marsala on clarinet, Bud Freeman on sax, Bob Casey on bass, "Wild Bill" Davison on cornet, Brad Gowans on trombone; photographer Weegee in foreground.

Location:	New York, NY, US
Date taken:	December 20, 1945
Photographer:	Gjon Mili

Hell's Kitchen, by Weegee.

At the bar

Toilet

Drunk in the bowery

In the Paddy Wagon (NOT the same blow up of more famous version)

On the Spot 1940

Sammys 1944

1946 - 42nd St at 3rd Ave, Accident

famous news photographer Weegee with
actress Vampira (Maila Nurmi) 1952

Blanche Simms Killed White Fireman in Harlem
1938






Weegee Kiss: Famous photo by Weegee of Marilyn blowing a kiss. Out of print, very rare.

Speaking of rare, did you know there was a MOVIE???

Weegee’s New York

Directed by Weegee and Amos Vogel
US ca. 1952, 16mm, color, 20 min.

A classic American City Symphony, focusing on Coney Island circa 1950 when a million people would crowd its beaches on a Sunday.

The back of this postcard reads "Police are here shown recovering bodies between decks of the capsized Steamer Eastland."

Arthur Fellig, called Weegee, American, 1899-1968
Untitled (Kissing at the Movies)
c. 1952
Gelatin silver photograph
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Target Collection of American Photography, gift of Target Stores
© Weegee/International Center for Photography/Getty Images

Weegee [Arthur Fellig] (1899-1968), The Critic, 1943, gelatin silver print, © 1994 International Center of Photography, New York, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox;

Two Young Girls

ca. 1940
gelatin silver print from infrared negative
32.9 x 26.9 cm.
Gift of Daniel Wolf

"Harry Kaltman who owns this dairy store at 125 Delancy Street had his whole family behind the counter yesterday afternoon March 22, 1943."

"It was a friendly game of Bocci," circa 1939

"Reclining Nude"

"Girl in Audience Eating Ice Cream"

"Saturday Night, Sleeping," circa 1945

“People who work in the daytime are suckers,” he once said. Before the publication of his first book, “Naked City,” made him famous in 1945, he lived in a cheap room near police headquarters and was said to be so accustomed to working on the run that he once developed a picture of a prizefight in a subway motorman’s cab while rushing back to a newspaper office.

"Opening of the George Washington Bridge, New York City," Oct. 25, 1931

"Viewing News Report Of A Yankee Game, Times Square." Oct. 6, 1943

****
And then there was the NUDIE MOVIE:
The Imp-Probable Mr. Wee Gee

"Sherman Price directed this nudie comedy starring famed crime photographer Weegee, who was later the basis for several films including The Public Eye (1992). With a voice dubbed by Reuben Guberman, Weegee falls in love with a department-store mannequin and tracks her to Europe, where he meets peril atop the Eiffel Tower and a buxom ghost in London. The notion of a nudie comedy starring a photographer best known for bloody photos of gruesome death may be odd, but the film is entertaining enough for fans of the genre to enjoy". ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Imp-Probable Mr. Wee Gee.mov
Imp-Probable Mr. Wee Gee.mov.m4v
The 'Imp'probable Mr. Wee Gee (1966)

http://bedazzled.blogs.com/bedazzled_blue/2008/04/the-imp-probabl.html

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Quotes of information

One of his most striking perp-walk shots was of Norma Parker, a pretty young woman who in 1936 held up a number of restaurants on lower Broadway using a cap pistol, for which The Daily Mirror nicknamed her the Broadway Gun Girl.

By the end of the war, Weegee was in fact “Weegee the Famous.” Short and pug-ugly, with a boxy Speed Graphic camera always in hand and a cigar permanently in his teeth, he was recognized throughout the city and, increasingly, the country.

His book inspired “The Naked City,” a film in which Weegee makes a fleeting, Hitchcock-like appearance. That prompted a move to Hollywood, where Weegee hobnobbed with stars and got tiny acting parts in a few more films. But he never really fit into what he called “the Land of the Zombies” and moved back to Manhattan in 1951.His crime photography days were over. Until his death in 1968 he experimented with film and trick photography and toured the United States and Europe, giving lectures and enjoying his fame. In his travels he met Peter Sellers on the “Dr. Strangelove” movie set; an excerpt from an audiotaped conversation is on YouTube.

In 1968 the theater and film director Syeus Mottel, who was experimenting with still photography, was walking in Washington Square Park with a girlfriend. “I see Weegee sitting on a bench looking very forlorn, with an old camera, really a piece of junk, hanging from his neck,” Mr. Mottel recently recalled. “When I asked if he had any advice for a young photographer, he said, ‘Yeah, sharp elbows.’ ” While the young woman charmed Weegee, Mr. Mottel took photographs. When it came time for dinner, Weegee suggested Bernstein-on-Essex, a kosher Chinese restaurant.

In 1957, suffering from diabetes, Weegee took a small apartment at 451 West 47th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, a town house owned by his friend Wilma Wilcox, an amateur photographer. When he died he left the place crowded with equipment “and stacks and stacks of thousands of photos and negatives strewn about,” Mr. George said. “His philosophy of archiving was to keep everything in a barrel, so if anyone wanted anything, they’d come over and fish.” Much of that material came in the early 1990s to the International Center of Photography, which has mounted several exhibitions.“Along with everything else there was a cardboard box labeled ‘Weegee,’ ” Mr. George said. “It was opened several months after it arrived. Weegee was really in there.” It was his cremated remains. “Apparently some staffers got the heebie-jeebies from having the ashes around,” he said, “so I.C.P. arranged to have them dispersed at sea.”



I need to alert my friend in Hubcap City and my ex-boss Lisa (both Weegee fans) that there is a good article about Weegee in the New York Times today. Of course, being Weegee fans, you two probably already know everything in it. My favorite part is the passing mention of "Norma Parker, the Broadway Gun Girl," who robbed restaurants with a cap pistol. I ought to look up more information about her, or better yet, someone else should do it while I lie down.


Another portrait, this one of Arthur Fellig, the crime photographer of the streets of New York City, was taken under a bare bulb in Fellig’s seedy hotel room. Bill didn’t know it at the time, nor perhaps did Fellig but Fellig was dying of a brain tumor.
Earlier in his career Fellig slept in his clothes, a police radio
nearby. When he heard a radio call about a crime serious enough for his attention, he raced to the scene, often beating the cops. His seeming uncanny ability to pop up out
of nowhere earned him the nick- name of Ouija. Fellig couldn’t spell, but liked it enough that he changed his name to Weegee the Famous, even stamping it on the back of his
prints. Weegee’s room was filled with stuff of all kinds.
There was no place to sit other than on Weegee’s single bed, so Bill stood. The room was packed with prints and photographic paraphernalia. Weegee was in and out of consciousness as Bill attempted to interview him.
Then, during one of Weegee’s more lucid moments, (which looks more than slightly deranged,) Bill caught him on camera under the glaring light of the single bare bulb above the bed. The look in Weegee’s eye says it all.
Of that moment, Bill says, “Weegee was obviously tiring so I left him, a sad sick old man, alone with his life’s work. I knew I would never see him, or his like, again.”

Where was "Fellig’s seedy hotel room?"
Wilma's beautiful brownstone, neither seedy nor a hotel, at 451 West 47th St.

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