December 08, 2004

Weegee the Famous
posted by dng 19 years ago
  • via Warren Ellis
  • weegee is the bestest photog EVARRRRR.
  • Great site, thanks very much for sharing it! I'm not getting anything done today!
  • Thanks dng. Weegee is a very interesting character. He kept a police scanner in his car and usually beat the authorities to the sceene of the crime (Weegee = phonetic for ouija)
  • Some great photographs.I was enjoying them too, until I got to this one and it's associated comments. Getting some poor woman pissed then propping her up so he could get his "poignant" picture? Stuff that. For me the photographer for this kind of work should be just an eye and a memory. You comment by what and how you shoot, not by taking advantage like this. I went off the guy immediately.
  • Weegee fans might also like Garry Winogrand. True Gamecat, but Weegee's goal was to sell dramatic pictures to newspapers, especially tabloids. It the case of the opera picture, it doesn't look like he was going for poinancy as much as cynicism. One of the reasons he used a police scanner to arrive before the cops was so he could rearrange a crime scene if it wasn't sensational enough. The MOMA has an interesting analysis: "Photographs began to appear in newspapers around the turn of the century, and the heyday of newspaper photography did not get under way until the 1920s. But it did not take long thereafter to establish the staples of the trade: winners and losers, heroes and villains, catastrophes and celebrations—timeless dramas reinvigorated on a daily basis by the specificity of photographic fact. The genre was at its most pure in the tabloid papers, which dispensed with the facade of journalistic reserve in their headlong pursuit of sensation. Nevertheless, as the writer Luc Sante notes: "In Weegee's hands, this cynicism is so extreme it almost becomes a kind of innocence."
  • Rearrange a crime scene?--now I have less respect for the photos and the man. Sounds like his cynicism is so extreme he doesn't mind screwing the victims over ...again.