Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2025. 208 pp., 130 black-and-white illustrations, 8¼x10½x1".
— Peter Sellers
Born in 1899 in the Austro-Hungarian city of Lemberg (today part of Ukraine), Usher Fellig emigrated to the United States in 1913. Upon entry, his name was changed to Arthur Fellig. After teaching himself the basics of photography on his own, Fellig started his professional career as a photographer in 1918, working as both a darkroom technician and a reporter. The work he became most known for began around 1935, when he was a full-time freelance photojournalist. It was around this time he changed his name to Weegee, a homonym for Ouija, because as a reporter he claimed to be clairvoyant, always knowing just where to be as the action started. Working primarily for a leftist-leaning tabloid called PM Weekly, the photographer created an entirely unique archive of crime and other activities in New York City from Prohibition and through World War II.
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His news photography might best be described as proto-noir, reportage from the streets of America’s biggest city that looked like stills from the greatest film noir (is it just me, or did Weegee look a little like Edward G. Robinson?), made over a decade before Hollywood co-opted the style. Pioneering the use of flash, the photographer created a unique view of the streets with harsh lighting and deep blacks, making life in New York appear like an existential abyss. Never defining himself as political, Weegee nevertheless created a powerful vision about class in America by frequently giving voice to working-class life in the city. The PM Weekly did define itself as a progressive magazine, a label the photographer denied, but then again, he was also connected to Sid Grossman and the Photo League (where he had his first exhibition). All this work coalesced into his first monograph published in 1945, Naked City, a relentless and raw look at New York composed with over 230 pictures.
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Not long after Naked City, Weegee moved to Los Angeles and started what is now referred to as his second period as a photographer. It’s easy to imagine that the work he did in New York took a huge toll — witnessing so much pain and tragedy can never be easy, combined with the demands of running all his own production and business must have been exhausting. In California, he took his pictures in an entirely different direction and focused more on using the darkroom to define his pictures. He photographed many famous people of the day — Ronald Reagan, Mao Tse Tung, and Jackie Kennedy among them — and printed them by projecting the negatives through warped or frosted pieces of glass, prisms, and even condensers from his enlargers, making them all appear as slightly surreal caricatures (apparently Szarkowski hated this work and saw it as a joke, a complete waste of the photographer’s talent).
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Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is an accessible book that offers a clear, engaging introduction to Weegee’s work, not prioritizing the New York years over California. The pictures are divided into neat, thematic chapters, pointing to major trends and periods in the photographer’s career, each introduced by a quote by Weegee accompanied with a short passage explaining the selection. The contributors include Clement Cheroux, Cynthia Young, Isabelle Bonnet, and David Campany. Cheroux introduces the book and exhibition by presenting the idea that Weegee’s work anticipated Guy Debord and the Situationists International, the French artists that emerged in the 1960s. Like the SI, Weegee challenged our understanding of what cities represent, and, like Debord, understood the importance of the media in defining the urban condition (it’s likely Weegee and Debord never heard of one another). Bonet, a specialist in crime photography, offers insight into the emergence of crime scene photography, both regarding the tabloids and the development of forensic investigation techniques. Campany acknowledges the last major body of work Weegee developed while working on the set of Dr. Strangelove. Director Stanley Kubrick met Weegee early in his career; before he went to Hollywood, he worked as a news photographer in New York City. Kubrick loved Weegee’s work, even noted it as an essential influence, and felt it would be interesting to have him on set. He gave Weegee a unique role, he had already hired two other photographers to provide the studio production stills so the master was allowed to do as he pleased. Kubrick thought the harsh style Weegee developed would be refreshing compared to the more slick and polished pictures the studio wanted. And apparently the photographer really hit it off with Peter Sellers, even influencing the actor’s interpretation of the film’s main character, the Nazi scientist advising the Pentagon on nuclear strategy.
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Weegee: Society of the Spectacle provides a great introduction to the legendary photographer’s work. If one is really into collecting photobooks, there are certainly better examples of Weegee’s to be had (primarily Naked City, there are multiple printings of this book), but Society of the Spectacle offers a comprehensive, approachable overview of the photographer’s work, and thus it seems it was really intended as a souvenir for the exhibition rather than as a unique expression of the photographer’s work.
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