browseWeegee Portfolio
Weegee (Photographer)
WEEGEE PORTFOLIO
*Saturday 25 October 2008 - Saturday 20 December 2008 *
Weegee, the New York photographer whose images helped to shape the city’s myth of itself, was born Usher Fellig, in 1899, in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now in the Ukraine. He was renamed Arthur Fellig on arrival in New York in 1909. Within a few years he had dropped out of school to work as a photographer’s apprentice on the streets of the Lower East Side. In his early 20s he got a job in the Acme Newspictures darkrooms, where he worked for ten years before becoming one of their news photographers. Sometimes Weegee attributed his nickname to the time he served as a Acme ‘Squeegee Boy’, more often to the Ouija board and his news photographer skill at being in the right place when a story broke (he had a police radio in his apartment and carried one in his car). In the 1940s he worked on a retainer for the groundbreaking PM Newspaper. Drawing on his tabloid, PM and magazine feature photographs of crime and disaster, tenement life, street scenes and the city at play, Naked City (1945), his innovative portrayal of New York, was an instant success. Weegee’s People (1946) and Naked Hollywood (1953) followed. He worked at celebrity, enjoyed it and stamped his photographs, Weegee the Famous. He died in 1968.
In the tabloids and magazines Weegee’s photographs were usually cropped, the rich details of the full frame often lost. He himself cropped his images ruthlessly. In 1980 his widow Wilma Wilcox formed The Weegee Portfolio Inc, with Sid Kaplan, Aaron Rose & Larry Silver, to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints from the full negatives. Sid Kaplan had grown up idolising Weegee, photographed the same streets and, working in New York’s photo labs, once printed for him in the 1960s. There is some evidence to suggest that, before he died, Weegee was thinking of asking Kaplan to print a definitive set of exhibition images. The Portfilio company had an acrimonious two year history, during which time Kaplan, helped in the printing by Anna Mogyorosy and Aaron Rose, produced 25 portfolios with spares. The prints are considered the best ever made from Weegee’s negatives.
At the time the Portfolio was being printed in New York, Side Gallery organised the first UK tour of Weegee’s work. Amber/Side developed a good relationship with Wilma Wilcox, who had been in the left wing New York Photo League. Amber’s Murray Martin helped her in the winding-up of the Portfolio company, later coming to her rescue when there was a flood at a New York storage facility where Weegee’s work was being kept. He helped Wilma draw up the will which left the bulk of the Weegee collection to the International Center of Photography and before she died Wilma gave Amber all the work it was holding in Newcastle.
In the mid 1980s the Portfolio’s 49 images were edited down to 45 by Wilma and Weegee’s friend and fellow photographer Louis Stettner. For this exhibition Side Gallery is reinstating the full 49 and adding a selection of the photographs, printed at the same time, from which, at one point, a ‘wildcard’ 50th might have been added to the individual boxes.