In Dan Gilroy’s debut film Nightcrawler (our review), Jake Gyllenhaal plays a freelance crime journalist named Lou Bloom who lurks L.A.’s underbelly at night armed with a camcorder, capturing gruesome footage to sell to the news. Car crashes, murder, all around mayhem (and a healthy dose of misanthropy) are Bloom’s mealticket.
Over 80 years ago, over on the east coast, a portly cigar-chomping immigrant beat Gyllenhaal to the punch. In his time, Weegee (a take on Ouija) was the reigning champ of candid crime journalism, which he’s also credited as originating. As he helped conduct and shape the culture of tabloids as we know them, he also spotlighted the seedy, gritty side of the human experience, elevating murder and calamity to a high art.
Weegee was born in the the Ukraine in 1899, under the name Ascher Fellig. When he was a baby, Fellig’s father moved to America to become a rabbi, later sending for the rest of his family once he’d earned enough bread. At age 10, Fellig emigrated to the U.S. with his mother and three brothers. When the family came through Ellis Island, his Ascher name was anglicized to Arthur.
The family had trouble making ends meet, so despite being a good student, Arthur was forced to leave school shortly after the eighth grade. He worked a bunch of odd jobs around the Lower East Side but it wasn’t until he had his picture taken by a street photographer that Arthur felt he’d found his calling. He purchased his own tintype camera and hit the streets.
His first racket was taking photos of kids in their Sunday best, sitting atop a pony he’d rented from a local stable. Afterwards he’d try to hock the photos to the kids’ parents. Within a few years, he got his big break working in the darkroom of Acme Newspictures. There he’d develop other folks’ pictures for use as stock photos in the papers. But at night, while all the other employees were asleep, Arthur would creep out into the shadows and shoot emergencies, murders, and death. The office girls at Acme gave him the nickname “Weegee” after the infamous spirit board, because he seemed to possess a supernatural intuition for breaking news.
From 1935 to 1945, Weegee was the preeminent freelance crime photographer of NYC. At first he’d find stories by going into Manhattan police headquarters and sniffing out whatever he could find on the teletype machine. He quickly grew tired of this, so he bought himself a souped-up ’38 Chevy Coupe, complete with portable dark room in the trunk and police radio (he was the only press photographer ever given permission to have one in his car). Equipped with spare cameras, flash bulbs, and even a typewriter, Weegee stalked the streets at night, chasing down “Page One” stories, oftentimes beating cops to the scene. His four-wheeled studio allowed him to expedite the process from negative to printed photo, giving him one hell of an advantage over other press hounds.
For the times he wasn’t out on the beat, Weegee rented an apartment directly across from police headquarters. He naturally kept a police scanner next to his beat and would sleep with one ear open. Somehow, he’d manage to snooze through humdrum police calls, then spring outta bed for the juicy ones. He’d sell his photographs to the tabloids and various news photo agencies, eking out a living in a profession most starved their way through while in the process becoming a minor celebrity around town.
When asked how Weegee picked what stories he’d chase after, he said he looked for ones with a name. Barroom brawls between nobodies in Hell’s Kitchen might fetch him $10, but a scrap between society types would draw the big bucks (maybe $25). In Naked City, Weegee’s first collection, he explains that murders and fires were “my two best sellers, my bread and butter.”
Murders were the easiest for him to shoot. Stiffs made the best models, because they “couldn’t get temperamental” and stayed there on the concrete for a good two hours before being carted away in the meat wagon. Weegee observes in Naked City that at murder scenes, the bodies always seemed to be well-dressed, face-up on the sidewalk with their hats sitting beside them. They always had hats, “pearl gray” ones. He jokingly said one day he wanted to just go follow a guy in a pearl gray hat and set up his camera so he can catch an actual murder as it happens.
“I had so many unsold murder pictures lying around my room…I felt as if I were renting out a wing of the City Morgue.” – Weegee
He even took so many shots of the era’s most notorious criminals – Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Mad Dog Coll – while they were behind bars that he became known as the official photographer of “Murder, Inc.”
With fires, Weegee had to work much more quickly. He shot a lot of photos of people being rescued and he was fascinated by the items they risked their lives to retrieve from the flames (snakes, art, violins, religious artifacts). He also always made sure to take shots of the crowds watching the fires, in case the cops were looking for a known pyro. There are a lot of Weegee shots of fire survivors, which he preferred over the burnt up corpses. When firemen would come out with victims, they’d retrieve a priest to deliver last rites. This ritual always made Weegee cry.
He wept because through all the murder and mayhem, Weegee was a shy and sensitive guy. It wasn’t all about the paycheck for him. He sincerely liked humanity in all its beauty and ugliness. Aside from the crime beat, he snapped photos of lovers at Coney Island, opera singers, Sinatra, the black community in Harlem, and simply anyone and everyone from all walks of life. His street cred swelled so big, he even managed to break into the film world. Stanley Kubrick brought him in as technical consultant on Dr. Strangelove because he wanted the film to have the sharp flash effect of Weegee’s photos.
But man, his crime photos are something else. The excitement and urgency still bleeds off of them to this day. Their gritty candidness displays how murder and violence are commonplace, but that all this bullshit happens to real humans – not just people on the movie screen.
His work now rests in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. There are loads of places online to check out his work as well.