How did the photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, go from hard-boiled shots of New York murder victims, criminal arrests and tenement fires during the 1930s and ’40s — classic images that have never been equaled — to the cheesy distorted portraits of Hollywood celebrities that engaged him for the last 20 years of his life?
That question is posed, if not persuasively answered, by “Weegee: Society of the Spectacle,” a career-spanning retrospective that runs through May 5 at the International Center of Photography, which owns Weegee’s archive. Like your family’s ugly knickknacks that are sequestered in the attic, the lesser-known photographs of Weegee, from the late 1940s until his death in 1968, have been mostly ignored by critics as an embarrassment. This is a rare chance to view the work and make a judgment.
Arguing a revisionist case for the disparaged late output of a major artist is a popular endeavor. While the effort has partially succeeded for Pablo Picasso, the verdicts on the decline of Francis Picabia, Robert Frank, Giorgio de Chirico and Willem de Kooning have not, at least to my mind, been reversed. Nor will this show change most opinions about Weegee.
It is the contention of the curator, Clément Chéroux, director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, which organized the exhibition with the ICP, that Weegee — both during his glory years in New York and then, in a completely different body of work that began in Hollywood in 1947, and continued after his return to New York in 1952 — consistently portrayed the urban spectacle. To support that theory, Chéroux enlists the French critic Guy Debord, whose book, “The Society of the Spectacle,” published in 1967, argued that in the advanced stages of capitalism, a world dominated by consumer commodities is perceived as images representing those commodities — or, in a word, as spectacle.
Many of Weegee’s most powerful pictures focus on spectators. Although famously quick to arrive at the scene of the disaster (a police radio tipped him off with the preternatural accuracy of an Ouija board, probably the source of his nickname), he inevitably got there after the homicide had occurred or the car had crashed. What was happening in the decisive moment was the reaction. By turning his camera on the spectators, not the victim, he captured something vital, not dead.
The emotions of the onlookers often appeared incongruous, because they found violent death entertaining. In “Their First Murder,” one of his greatest photographs, Weegee portrayed a bunch of kids craning their necks, curious and grinning, while behind them, in the center of the frame but relatively inconspicuous, a woman’s face is contorted in grief. She was the aunt of the ill-fated small-time mobster, whose body we don’t see.
The mixture of glee and sorrow in that crowd mirrors Weegee’s own contradictory sentiments. An immigrant from Ukraine, he sided with the hard-pressed people, many of them foreign-born, who inhabited his stomping grounds in Little Italy and the Lower East Side. Understandably, he especially identified with rubberneckers: the line of gawkers behind a parapet as the police examined a corpse on the roof of a neighboring building; the cop, in smiling conversation, who is oblivious to the bloodstained body on the sidewalk nearby; the people peering out their windows and standing on their fire escapes to gaze at a slain man sprawled in a cafe doorway.
He sided with the downtrodden, but with a smirk, not a sob. The picture Weegee called his favorite underscores that. At his request, an assistant found a disheveled, drunken woman on the Bowery and brought her outside the Metropolitan Opera on opening night. When two elegant ladies in white furs and tiaras approached the entrance, Weegee’s inebriated surrogate brayed with derision from the sideline. He fired the flash and pressed the shutter. He called the picture “The Critic.”
Weegee’s smart-aleck attitude was his armor. Bereavement discomfited him. He initially attached the brutal title “Roast” to a photograph of two anguished women watching a Brooklyn house fire that is incinerating their family members. But when he included it in his book “Naked City,” the title had morphed into “I Cried When I Took This Picture.” The dual titles reflect the split nature of an artist whose sympathy is inextricably alloyed with mockery. In Weegee’s world, life is nasty, brutish and short. Tears are wasted.
Like Dorothea Lange and other Farm Security Administration photographers of the Great Depression, Weegee reveled in ironic wordplay. His was even more caustic. In 1943, he captured high-pressure fire truck hoses drenching a burning building, the headquarters of the American Kitchen Products Company, which is embellished with a painted slogan for bouillon cubes: “Simply Add Boiling Water.” In another of his images (included in the catalog but not the show), the body of a murdered man lies at the entrance of a Little Italy cafe, beneath a plate-glass window that advertises Camel cigarettes: “5 Extra Smokes Per Pack.”
Neither the cleverness of approach nor the compassion for the underdog are to be found in the post-World War II work that he described as “caricatures,” “distortions” or “creative photography.” He made these pictures using different methods: heating the negatives with boiling water or flame, inserting curved or wavy glass between the enlarger and the printing paper, or superimposing multiple exposures on the same sheet.
Surrealist and Dada photographers had similarly manipulated negatives and prints, even melting emulsions to suggest deliquescing bodies. But for Weegee, the technique seemed to serve no purpose other than buffoonery — turning President Kennedy’s teeth into a palisade fence or Andy Warhol’s face into a blurry montage akin to a Francis Bacon portrait. Although it is no wonder that he had lost the energy to race to the latest fire or murder from his combined apartment and studio in New York (conveniently located opposite police headquarters), he needed to come up with a worthy substitute. He didn’t.
Debord argued that ordinary people who lead alienated, fragmented existences and never feel truly alive deify celebrities as paragons of consumption and power. Weegee’s famous people are the opposite: familiar faces shattered into shards or stretched like taffy. Much closer to Debord’s ideal is a Warhol silk-screen painting of Marilyn, Liz or Jackie; they convey the mass allure of celebrity with an acuity and verve that Weegee’s caricatures never approached (although his New York pictures of auto accidents and fires anticipated Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series).
Weegee, at his best, in his New York heyday, exulted in the excitement of the city, where both the highs and the lows are thrilling. Whether he portrays people in seemingly infinite crowds at the Coney Island beach and Times Square rallies, or in smaller groups eyeballing a disaster or a corpse, they are bound together in urban communion.
The work Weegee made before his distortions doesn’t support Debord’s theory, it refutes it. As spectators, his subjects connect to other spectators, and, like the photographer, they pulse with life. The puerile distortions that lured him down a dead-end road remain a mystery, as does how such a talented man took such a wrong turn.
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle
Through May 5, International Center of Photography, 84 Ludlow Street, Manhattan; 212 857-000, icp.org.