Weegee
Arthur Fellig was born in 1899 in Austria, emigrating with his family to Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1909.
1914-23 - forced to leave school to help support his family, Weegee made a living for a time as a street photographer in the East Side ghetto. After a series of poorly paid jobs, which included a stint as a fiddle accompanist at a silent cinema, he found a permanent position at Acme News Services as their darkroom operator. The Acme agency specialised in hard news and Weegee was to spend 12 years there.
1935 - leaves Acme to freelance. After the seclusion of the darkroom he initially finds it difficult to photograph on the street but the next 10 years are to be successful and productive.
1937 - becomes the only civilian allowed to install a police radio in his car (the ‘Weegee’ name came from the Ouija board and his reputation for being at crime scenes even before the police).
1940-44 - on retainer to PM newspaper with freedom to choose his own stories. Weegee makes some of his best pictures in this period.
1944 - Exhibition at the Photo-League. First candid photographs using infra-red film and flash.
1945 - Museum of Modern Art exhibition. Publication of the best seller ‘Naked City’.
1946 - Assignments for Vogue magazine. ‘Weegee’s People’ is published.
1947-51 - Travels to Hollywood, lecturing and photographing for ‘Naked Hollywood’ (1953). He becomes technical adviser and character actor in many feature films.
By the late 1940s Weegee had emerged as a national celebrity and enjoyed that status. His spirit and interests changed. He explored distortion lenses, the polaroid process, and produced photo-caricatures of famous people, going on to win occasional, highly paid assignments, and travelling widely until his death in New York in 1968.
Weegee Collection
from: Photography
Classic documentary photographs of New York taken between the 1930s and the 1960s. The work was given to Amber by Weegee's widow Wilma Wilcox following Side Gallery's organisation of the first tour of his work in the UK in the early 1980s.