I’ve found the story from the New York Times about the lucky find of 210 vintage prints by Weegee, along with a number of letters written by him mentioned in several places. (Some features on the NYT require you to register.)
Two women from Indiana were driving back from a camping holiday when they stopped at a ‘yard sale’ outside a house in Kentucky, and a zebra-striped trunk caught the interest of one of them, so she bought it. Inside she found some old clothes, letters and photographs and almost threw the whole lot away.
Something made her feel they might have some value and instead she took the letters and photos to a dealer in Indianapolis, and the Museum of Art there now has the new items in their collection.
Apparently there are no unknown images among the prints, and the letters are not exactly enthralling, but it is still quite a find to pick up as junk when someone clears out their attic. They are thought to have belonged to Weegee’s companion in his later years, Wilma Wilcox, who died 25 years after him in 1993, but how they got to Kentucky has not been determined.
Weegee prints typically sell for around £5000 each, so that’s quite a trunkload, even if many of the images are from his later and hopefully less collectable work when he had decided he was an ‘artist’ rather than a photographer.
Usher Fellig was born in Gallicia, then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, later (and previously) Poland and now in the Ukraine in 1893, but came with his family to New York’s largely Jewish Lower East Side when he was ten – and they changed his first name to Arthur to avoid anti-semitism. By the time he was 14 was supporting his family, taking on a number of badly paid jobs on the streets of New York, including working as an assistant to a street photographer, who taught him his trade.
In 1923 he got a job in the darkroom of Acme New Services, where he stayed for 12 years, although he apparently he occasionally got to take pictures when had to dep for photographers who were to drunk to work or otherwise unable to make their shift.
In1935 he left, and tried to find work as a freelance photographer. (Although in the radio interview – see below – he talks about sleeping on a park bench, things were not quite that tough and he had a small one room flat, but the bench was probably more comfortable on hot summer nights.)
For a couple of years he spent a lot of time hanging around next to the teletype desk at police headquarters, waiting for news of crimes to come in that he could rush out and cover. They should have thrown him out for not having a press card, but he managed without, and once he got a few pictures printed in the papers he managed to get one.
It was perhaps because the police got fed up with this guy hanging around that they allowed him to fit a police radio into the boot of a car – which was otherwise illegal. Although Weegee had undoubtedly developed a sixth sense for when and where he could find a picture on the street, it was this radio rather than a ‘ouiji’ board that enabled him to get to crime scenes before the pack.
The car also carried a portable darkroom a in the boot so he could develop his film and make contact prints, and a portable typewriter for captions and text – a full press kit which meant he could file almost as fast as today’s digital photographers.
He became known to everyone by the nickname ‘Ouiji (for what these days we more often call it a Ouija board) but then styled himself ‘The Famous Weegee‘ as people had trouble with the spelling. From 1940-44 he was on a retainer to the New York left-wing daily PM (for Picture Magazine, a loss-making newspaper which had no advertising on principle, but relied on support from an eccentric millionaire Marshall Field III, grandson of the founder of the famous Chicago department store.) It was during these years that he produced his most memorable work from the streets of New York.
He became well known, with a show at the Photo League in 1941 followed by one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1945. Getting assignments for Vogue in 1946 was probably the beginning of the end so far as his serious photography was concerned. He became convinced not just that he was a great artist, but that in order to be one he had to stop taking the kind of pictures that had made him one.
His book Naked City, which came out in 1945 (and is still in print) made him even more famous, and was the inspiration for the film of the same name (they purchased the title from him), a film noir classic shot on the streets of New York in 1948, which later spawned a TV series. All of human life is certainly there.
Weegee himself became the model for a photographer in the films of the period, complete with cigar and “4×5 Speed Graphic with a Kodak Ektar lens in a Supermatic shutter, all American made. I always use a flash bulb for my pictures, which are mostly taken at night. I work alone and don’t use extension lights, tripods, or exposure meters. I get snappy results from using Number 3 enlarging paper. ” As well as acting as a technical advisor in Hollywood he also had a number of small parts in films
Recommended Web Sites
ICP – Weegee’s World
http://museum.icp.org/museum/collections/special/weegee/weegee.html
Amber Online – Weegee Collection
http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/weegee-collection
Sound Portraits – Radio Interview from 1945
http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/weegee/
