-freelance Weegee
25/10/201011:35:00
journalist who made his living selling pictures of urban catastrophes like murders, fires, and car accidents to tabloid newspapers - In 1945 published Naked City to you the people of new York - central cast of characters includes tenement dwellers fleeing blazing buildings and gawking at murder victims lying in the street - Naked City depicts a city of desperation and destitution cut through with scenes of joy and humor - criminal suspects being handcuffed by police, bloody corpses lying in the street, lonely men and women wandering the dark sidewalks. A young girl swooning at Frank Sinatra, couples kissing in the backs of movie theaters, tenement children splashing in the spray of an open fire hydrant) - Naked City employs and dismantle many of the central protocols of canonical documentary and journalistic photography -through a unique hybrid aesthetic that blends documentary and tabloid conventions - Weegee simultaneously records the urban scene and exposes the privileges and pretensions prevalent in traditional documentary practice - critics have often placed Weegee within the documentary canon - his late night flash and infrared photographs of people sleeping on park benches and fire escapes recall the work of Jacob Riis -like Riis, Weegee often captures his subjects unaware, exposing their private, intimate acts for public scrutiny -his images of suspended criminals going into the police station a shadow archive of deviant types -naked city also draws on the visual rhetoric of the 1930s fsa documentary which invoked photographys truth effect to induce a liberal, sentimental response from middle class audiences to pictures o privation and resilience - Pic of mom & daughter watching burning building: I cried when I took this picture when you find yourself beginning to feel a bong with the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you know youre on the right track - his work also suggests the inadequacy of documentary realism as a mode of rendering the urban real -emphasis on photographic spontaneity, the aggressive nature of his gaze, and his focus on catastrophe - heat spell depicts eight children sleeping on a tenement fire escape
-3 representational modes: 1. By surreptitiously documenting the habits of the poor, recording their activities without their knowledge, the photograph enacts a riis-like gesture of surveillance -body was a primary mode of urban expression frequently, bodies are captured mid-gesture, partially obscured from view, or frozen in midst of an awkward moment - Their first murder group of children and 2 women reacting to the sight of a murder victim lying on the street - his photography represents both the very entertainment that the crows, as the audience of mass culture, craves and a record of the crowds pleasures in having its desires fulfilled -his identification with his subjects was quite likely a function of his own existence in NYs social fringes -moved to US from Austria at age 11 and left parents at 15, lived in NY flophouses, worked as a darkroom assistant and a street photographer. Often in slept his car (first automobile with a radio) or in a news service shack outside the police station -he was one of the nocturnal loners he spent his professional life photographing -beach shot captures the bathing bodies in a highly exposed state -bathers welcome the camera, waving and gesturing to the photographer -unofficial collective that seems to imply the potential for mass conformity -irreducible range of human difference and individuality -although many of weegees subjects are poor, they dont appear trapped by their poverty they take it w humor and intrepidity - should be placed on a level with Orson Welles and Walter Winchell the three flourished as innovating dramatists of hard sell in theater, movies, radio, photography, and news - Weegee uniquely identified himself as the archetypical new York native - Took Manhattan, the heterogeneous whole of it, quite consciously at his province - His photographs never speak on behalf of minorities, but also he hardly thinks of them as living across some gap or at any cultural distance from his own station in life - portrayed the diversity of people under pressure or in trouble - photo show at the league: Weegee: Murder is my Business 1941 -movie based on his life: The Public Eye (1992) -Coney Island at Noon for this one moment, the people pose for their collective portrait, they let themselves be seen by the public eyehe made it seem as if they whole motley crew comprises his extended family. In the next instant tho, theyll all be elbowing one another for a tiny patch of sand, relating only to their own companions and dissociating from the rest
- In his book: for the pictures in this book I was on the scene: sometimes drawn there by some power I cant explain, and I caught the new Yorkers with their masks off, not afraid to laugh, cry, or make love. -Had difficulty finding a publisherCleary helped him get it -immigrant -street photographerwalked around a tried to convince people to pay him to have their picture taken - analogous to people who went around the streets with music/entertainment -eventually he moves from street trade to working for a company, develops printing there, grows up and starts to freelance -freelance, mid to late 30sbegins to have successsells photos to tabloids -when newspaper PM is foundedleftwing daily paper that relies heavily on photographs but doesnt use any advertising. -weegee becomes a staff photographer and begins to get creditgood for his career b/c with his name attached to the photographs he begins to think differently about the pictures -Meyer is interested in the multiple uses of the photographtaken, newspaper, tabloid, hung on walls of photo league, naked city. 2nd life, 3rd life, etc -weegee has figured out how to give more life to the same pictures, hes a self-promoterpart of the way in which eh promotes the pictures -lees argument: PM/photo league left ness.shapes how the book came together - competing with war pictures, FSAs pictures of America, holocaust atrocity pictures -public appetite for looking at difficult pictures has been wedded -Naked cityportrait of NY naked/exposed -focuses on single room occupancies -