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Weegee: Society of the Spectacle
Photographs by Weegee

Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2025. 208 pp., 130 black-and-white illustrations, 8¼x10½x1".

"I was stuck, you see, because I didn’t want to do sort of a normal English broken German accent thing, so on the set was a little photographer from New York, a very cute little fellow called Weegee. You must have heard of him. And he had a little voice…And I got an idea…I put a German accent on top of that, and I suddenly got…him into Dr. Strangelove. So really, it’s Weegee."

— Peter Sellers

Currently on view at the ICP in New York is Weegee: Society of the Spectacle (Jan. 23-May 05, 2025). Incredibly, this is the 6th exhibition dedicated to gruff tabloid photographer; this is in part due to a recent donation to the museum of Weegee’s work by his partner Wilma Wilcox. I haven’t seen the show, but the catalog, published by Thames & Hudson, offers an interesting survey of the curiously unique vision of Weegee.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Record 2 by Daido Moriyama.

Record 2
Photographs by Daido Moriyama

Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2024. 352 pp., 270 illustrations, 8¼x11".

The first book I got by Daido Moriyama was '71 New York, published by Andrew Roth and PPP Editions in 2002. This was a great introduction to the photographer’s work — the size and density of a brick, the book is a relentless barrage of photographic dissonance showing a life on the brink. The rich, grainy black-and-white pictures describe a hunter on the prowl — not for game, but for an understanding of the phenomenology of being and day-to-day life in New York. The pictures also struck me as the work of an outlaw; the first time I paged through '71 New York, I felt I could smell the whiskey, cigarettes, and hypo. When Moriyama went to New York in 1971, he didn’t speak English, and spent his days just as you would imagine, making hundreds of pictures of life on the streets. He must have stayed up all night processing his pictures, because he also made a series of books of his daily musings, xeroxing his darkroom prints to make cheap and crude reproductions, bound collections of photographs (though I might prefer anti-photographs) that he gave away to people he met during his stay. PPP Editions revisited these pictures, making a beautifully produced book that epitomizes Moriyama’s vision.

The second Moriyama book I got was Memories of a Dog (Nazraeli Press, 2004), a collection of essays the photographer wrote in the 1980s for Asahi Camera, a series he conceived as a regular contributor to the magazine. Each issue Moriyama provided short text/image documents that portrayed his wanderings across Japan. The essays were largely written on his train rides before and after the shoots, juxtaposed with pictures made on location. Memories of a Dog shares just the essays, understanding that they are great pieces of photographic literature in and of themselves. Indeed, I was surprised the first time I read it because I was imaging something rough like his pictures, but instead found some deep, reflective thinking about the nature of photography, place, and memory.

I still consider both these books among my favorites today; from the beginning I’ve loved the raw, anti-photography sentiment in ’71 New York — really all his early work — and the surprisingly reflective, patient, and articulate voice found in Memories of a Dog. Together they show what I’ve learned most from Moriyama, to pursue photography in a way that is raw, relentless, and aggravated, like an assault but tempered by a reflective and emotional intelligence.

The new book from Thames & Hudson, Record 2, reproduces a series of self-published magazines called Record that Moriyama produced between 2016-2020, issues #31-50. Each issue starts with a short piece of writing and is then followed by pictures that represent the time between the publications. In many ways, Record 2 represents so much of what I’ve come to love about the photographer’s work — dark and gritty pictures made with insatiable hunger. This compendium is beautifully produced — bound with a slipcase, the pages are rich, glossy black-and-white images, each one offering another complex, passionate photograph. I remember seeing some of the original printings of Record at Dashwood, so feel confident in saying the Thames & Hudson edition provides a lovely interpretation of the work. It is made with the same glossy production values, bound in a way that makes it a substantial, definitive archive of the artist’s work, but still represents the quick and urgent feel that embodied the xeroxes in New York City. That feel, the sense of urgency, is a lovely characteristic of Moriyama’s work, and it is an achievement to make such a prestigious, highly-produced monograph that maintains that sensibility.

My favorite part of Record 2 is the writing. The pictures are superlative, no doubt, but there is something so rigid and stylistic about Moriyama’s approach. The short texts, however, have an informal, conversational appeal, like he’s talking to you on the train. In them we witness Moriyama reflecting on ideas developed during his friendship with Takuma Nakahira; things he learned from Bruce Davidson, Eikoh Hosoi, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Eraserhead; the COVID lockdown; and receiving the Hasselblad Award. These things clarify Moriyama’s achievement for me; he was a street photographer who made Winogrand look lazy, constantly making pictures in a dark gritty manner while watching life unfold on the streets of Japan from post-war reconstruction through the ambitious expansion of the 1970s, its emergence as a global economic force in the 1990s, and into the age of data. Throughout it all, he maintained a restless, independent voice, and created a photographic vision that feels as raw as The Ramones and as wise as Zen.

Thames & Hudson is creating a multivolume series chronicling Record. I’ve only seen this second installment, but I am eager for more. If you really want to explore Moriyama’s writing, I still recommend Memories of a Dog, and if you are new to his work, I’d really encourage you to find his earlier books. Nevertheless, Record 2 is another testament to the mastery and depth of the photographer’s work and accomplishments.

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Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Look at the U.S.A. By Peter van Agtmael.

Look at the U.S.A.
Photographs by Peter van Agtmael
Thames & Hudson, London, UK, 2024. 352 pp., 7½x9½x1¼".

Over a two-decade career, Peter van Agtmael has earned a reputation as one of America’s best war photographers. He has covered active conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Kuwait, among other distant locales. The resulting pictures have helped him gain admission to Magnum, win a Guggenheim and ICP Infinity Award, and supply the contents for five photography monographs to date. By every measure he is on top of the photo world.

But war has its costs. An environment of constant anxiety, violence, loss, and moral ambiguity will wear anyone down over time. That’s true for photographers as well as soldiers or hapless civilians.

Van Agtmael is a case in point. When he first left college to cover the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11, he was a gung-ho young stud, eager for adventure. He’d do nearly anything to get the shot he needed, risks be damned. After all, “every twenty-year-old thinks they are going to be one of the lucky ones.” After more than a decade of conflict coverage, his tune had shifted. He had hit the photo wall, or perhaps just matured, depending on your point of view. “One morning I woke up groggy, having drunk most of a bottle of arak the night before, and felt glued to my bed” he journaled in 2017. “I couldn’t bear to drive down the road to Mosul again. I called my editor and said I was done.”

Spoiler alert: that decision turned out to be a false alarm. The adrenaline junkie in van Agtmael could not quit so easily, and he soon resumed his photojournalist duties. Once back on the front lines, another conflict simmered inside, a tug-of-war between his lifelong drive to make photos and his growing disenchantment with the enterprise. “Sometimes I felt like a real bastard to be taking pictures,” he remembers, “but it felt worse when I hesitated and let a powerful moment pass.”

The above passages come from van Agtmael’s recent photobook Look at the U.S.A. It’s a dense book of words and images, and its subheading — A Diary of War and Home — is a fitting description. Blending photographs, screenshots, graffiti, memories, and straight reporting, this book is a deep reflection on both international conflict and inner development.

The majority of material is drawn from 2005 to the present. Followers of van Agtmael will recognize most of the images from past books and photo essays. Photographically speaking Look at the U.S.A. is a checklist of old favorites, some of them bordering on iconic. It might be considered a mid-career retrospective of sorts (in conjunction with a related 2022 exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center). But the book’s multitude of texts and personal asides make for something more than a simple highlight reel, hewing closer to memoir than slideshow. Van Agtmael’s edit is deft and varied, mixing words and images into a multimedia timeline with real narrative pace. Imperialist folly gets taken down a notch in the process, as van Agtmael becomes an outright critic of reactionary policies. But the more interesting subplot is van Agtmael’s personal growth.

It’s no surprise that van Agtmael became disillusioned with war. We have seen the same dawn of recognition in numerous infantry protagonists, from Henry Fleming to Paul Baumer to Billy Pilgrim. But where past heroes left their critiques on the battlefield, van Agtmael’s awakening takes a woke twist back home. I began to understand the U.S.A. when I was in Iraq,” he writes. After arriving home, he visited protests, rallies, demonstrations, and other fault lines — and the American underbelly turned up ugly scenes. Several dozen are included in this book. “Rather than being an abomination of the past,” he writes, “the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were an extension of the reckless and hubristic empire building that we always called something else. That violence started at home.”

Van Agtmael had no trouble finding photographs to support this conviction, especially during the Trump years. In fact, his dystopian verdicts come across as vaguely Trumpian. In any case, pictures of Klan rallies, George Floyd protests, and the January 6th Capitol riot evidence a nation of deep internal turmoil. Tensions boiled over in 2020 — events from that time give the book a slightly dated feeling — but make no mistake, the nation is still on high simmer. After initially miring in foreign affairs and camouflaged figures, a good chunk of its latter half is taken up regular citizens caught up in domestic strife. “Look at the U.S.A.” indeed. Ironically the title is adapted from an Iraqi library card.

Regardless of venue, van Agtmael is a talent. Put him in Mosul or Arizona and he will come back with stellar pix. This volume is packed with strong photographs. Of course we knew that already, as proven in past monographs. The revelation here is that he’s a powerful writer too, with a direct and diaristic voice. Reading the various passages, you can feel him sorting through his thoughts on the page, wondering about the fate of himself and his country. If his reporter’s voice occasionally comes off as didactic, it fits the bland center-left tone of mainstream journalism. Look at the U.S.A. in 2024 and you’ll find a nation wrestling with its identity and its future, observed by an increasingly worried media as well as other nations. This book manages to cover all three POVs. But above all it expresses van Agtmael’s.

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Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography.

Collaboration
A Potential History of Photography

Thames & Hudson, 2024. 288 pp., 724 color illustrations, 8¾x11½".

In 1968 Sontag recorded her impressions of a first visit to Vietnam in a book titled Trip to Hanoi, where she confessed early doubts about photography. She landed in Hanoi, only to realize that photographs had clouded her perspective with preconceptions of Vietnam. To understand how the war truly affected the people in the North, she needed to see beyond photographs.

— Thy Phu, Warring Visions

Collaboration is informed by decolonial, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, feminist and abolitionist struggles. We tried to reconstruct, challenge, imagine, and reenact collaboration as the different protagonists experienced it…We have not stopped with the photographer’s ‘intentions’ or ‘statements’, but rather we look at the photographic event as it unfolds over time. Attending the mode of participation of the photographed persons, in particular, enabled us to reconfigure also the participation of the photographers, not as solo masters but rather as parties to the event of photography.

— Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography

In 1992, I traveled to Bali, Indonesia for the first time as part of a study abroad program. I spent 6-months studying Balinese Hinduism and the remarkable music unique to the island. Since that time, Indonesia has been central in shaping my ideas about music, photography, art, and art history. For decades now, I’ve struggled with the ethics of my work, a white man working in a colonized nation. I’ve always questioned my privilege in relation to my work in Indonesia — at times, I’ve been disgusted by it — and, as a result, I’ve found myself wrestling with complex ideas about power, imperialism, and personal identity. At times, my work with Indonesia has been profoundly humbling, empowering, and confusing, but, ultimately, I cling to the belief that I can contribute to new, anti-colonial histories. In developing my projects in Bali and Java, I have come to the conclusion that a truly revisionist approach to history has to be collaborative. We can’t erase colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, so we must think of new ways to share resources and try to tell larger stories about the consequences of subjugation.

Uyghur Community by Carolyn Drake

As one fully devoted to photography, I’ve been fascinated by the history of the medium since I first picked up a camera. I’ve hungrily read many different approaches to the subject, but none of them reflect the kinds of issues I found researching photography in Indonesia (the Szarkowski history, included Gordon Parks and Roy Decarava, but certainly never ventured into the dark history of photography as an essential tool of colonialism). Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, a new book developed by Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler, comes as a breath of fresh air. It is the first history of photography I’ve read that starts with the understanding that the medium has been essential in establishing the racist, classist, and sexist foundations of our “democratic” institutions.

Scherzo di Follia by Pierre-Louis Pierson

The book is divided into 8 sections (the authors call them clusters), each of these based on the premise that any photograph is an event, built on collaborative give-and-takes between the photographer(s) and subject(s). In presenting the various projects, the editors attempted to include the voices of both the makers and the subjects (to be clear, there is nothing about landscape or experimental approaches to photographic materials, this is strictly a sociological study of the medium). Indeed, Collaboration takes this a step further by encouraging all readers to treat the book as a living document; we as viewers are part of the collaboration by bringing meaning and conversation to photographs. The editors encourage us to use the book as a conversation starter, not necessarily as a completed work, and to bring it to our studios, galleries, and classrooms. This all-inclusive paradigm, for defining the photographic act and our understanding of the resulting images, is intended to help create a revisionist history, undermining Szarkowski’s (and so many others) need to point to individual genius.

Sabrina and Katrina by Endia Beal

Everything about the book is a collaboration, fully embracing its own core ideals. Compiled by the 5 editors, each representing different disciplines or approaches to photography, the clusters are built around different themes, each detailing a variety of photographic projects. The projects are each presented with a selection of pictures accompanied by quotes from their makers, including both the photographers and, when possible, the subjects. The editors selected the work, but rather than giving their own reasons for inclusion, they asked different writers to respond to each of the individual projects, ensuring that every component of the book is a collaboration, enriched with layers of conversation. Some of these writers are familiar names, but many I had to look up. And, like the editors themselves, the contributing authors represent an array of disciplines and perspectives, creating a truly interdisciplinary approach to the medium.

Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography

I want to conclude by returning to Indonesia; this book facilitated a great deal of introspection on that work in ways that are helpful in relating my understanding of the editors’ intentions. About 2-months after returning from my study abroad program, I met with a Peace Corps volunteer on my college campus. We talked about a lot of things, but what sticks with me is our conversation about privilege. I’d spent the previous months living in Peliatan, a village of about 6,000 in south Bali. There was one phone and one fax machine for the entire village (this was pre-internet). Most people had refrigerators and TVs, but electricity could be intermittent and there were no such things as laundry machines or VCRs. When I got home, I felt so disgusted by the American abundance that I saw clearly for the first time. I told the volunteer I wanted to give away everything I own and move back to Bali so that I could spend the rest of my life studying gamelan and Hinduism. The volunteer was an African American woman who just returned from service in Ghana. She too was wrestling with some big questions about personal and cultural identity. I remember one thing she told me quite clearly — never give up your privilege, but always strive to make sure you are using it for good instead of propagating more abuse. Indeed, this stuck with me to the point that I’ve worked to make it the defining element of my work in Indonesia since.

Aaliya, digital collage by Hamida Zourgui. Original photograph by Jean Besancenot.

Notions of privilege aren’t overtly discussed in Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, but I do think this is important in understanding the ideas presented by the authors. If collaboration is defined by sharing and exchanging resources, then sharing privilege is necessary for tipping the balance of powers, making a society that is truly democratic, not just in name, and escaping the boundaries of imperialism, patriarchy, and dominance. To be honest, there are things I don’t like about Collaboration (there is just a little information about a lot of photographic projects and ideas, making it read a bit like a historical tapas), but I also feel it offers essential ideas for recreating cultural and photographic paradigms. And, regardless, I think the book a must for anyone interested in photographic history or education.

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Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage.

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage
Photographs by Deborah Turbeville
Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2023. 240 pp..

Many years ago, I fell in thrall to Deborah Turbeville’s photography. Turbeville’s world was female centric and female authored. Her dreamlike images were infused with a feminine interiority like nothing I’d seen: a solid counterpoint to the widespread circulation of the male gaze and objectification of women.

Published in conjunction with a major traveling exhibition beginning at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage is a comprehensive journey into the work of Deborah Turbeville. Although she is renowned primarily for the genre of fashion photography, her entire body of work is that of an innovative and experimental artist.

By focusing on Turbeville’s use of collage throughout her practice, Photo Elysée Director Nathalie Herschdorfer not only brings unknown images to light, but also proposes that the genius of Turbeville’s work can be found in her collages. Drawing from the MUUS Collection’s archive of Turbeville’s estate and working with Richard Grosgard, advisor to MUUS Collection, Herschdorfer has produced a retrospective in book form, "situating Turbeville in the pantheon of 20th century photographic artists" and revealing the process of her singular practice.

From her breakout 1975 Vogue magazine succès de scandale, ‘Bathhouse,’ to individual women waiting in the woods (for what, for whom?), to the uninhabited palace of Versailles, Turbeville’s work implies a fictive narrative. Along with the human characters she introduces, her collages and photographs evoke the personification of location. A Turbeville mise en scène is unmistakably hers — atmosphere is everything, mood is all.

Mining her own archive, reusing images, and defacing photographs to create a sense of the timeworn and timeless, Turbeville removed her photographs from the here and now, placing her subjects in suspension in a liminal world. Her models are as singular as her photos: often women with unconventional faces, a sense of life lived — self-contained and inwardly focused. When one regards the reigning fashion photography trends of the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, Turbeville’s unique imagery is iconoclastic in the extreme.

Lavishly produced and sumptuously printed, at 240 pages, this is a big, beautiful book. The images blur the line between photographic reproductions and actual 3-D replications of Turbeville’s collages, complete with dressmaker’s pins, attendant shadows, yellowed tape, and brown paper backing. To turn the pages is to travel through her work with no distractions. Much care has been taken to reflect Turbeville’s aesthetic. The book’s design is elegant in every respect and fully illustrates both her photographic interests and the connections between personal work and paid assignments.

Bringing Turbeville’s body of work to a wider audience, Nathalie Herschdorfer has produced an expansive reappraisal of a brilliantly unique and generative artist. Photocollage is both a generous, deeply researched visual profile (and itself a work of artistry), but also, and principally, a tribute to an artist who followed her own true muse.

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Cheryl Van Hooven is a photographer and writer based in New York and often working in the California Mojave Desert. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints & Photographs, Imagery Estate Winery Permanent Collection at Sonoma State University, among others. She is currently working on a photo/text book.

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