Amber News

Step by Step back online

21st February 2008 By: Graeme Rigby

Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's great exhibition Step by Step is back on the website. We took this 1980s documentation of a North Shields dance school offline, when we found that ...more »

Blues Residency at Side Café

10th December 2007 By: Graeme Rigby

Tyneside's first lady of the blues Mo Scott and acoustic six string and slide guitar virtuoso Rod Sinclair are hosting a Tuesday night residency at Side Café in December and January - from hot blues...more »

Martin Stephenson Gig at Side Café

10th December 2007 By: Graeme Rigby

It's always a joy catching a Martin Stephenson gig, but an acoustic set in the intimacy of Side Café's upstairs lounge is going to be a rare treat. Clear away the excesses of Christmas, prepare...more »

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.