Side Gallery
Weegee Portfolio - Interview with Sid Kaplan
THE WEEGEE PORTFOLIO
The Weegee Portfolio, 49 (later 45) photographs printed in the early 1980s by the New York photographer and almost legendary darkroom master Sid Kaplan, is regarded as the best set of Weegee prints ever made. From 25th October to 20th December 2008 a new Side Gallery exhibition will make the fullest presentation of that work that has ever been seen. Amber/Side has one of the finest Weegee collections in the world, largely due to the work of Murray Martin, Amber founder member and key visionary who died in 2007. In 2008 Pat McCarthy visited New York, interviewing Sid Kaplan as part of the attempt to unravel the story. They were joined by Anna Mogyorosy, darkroom assistant on the project. Sid Kaplan talks of his own encounters with Weegee and, together with Anna Mogyorosy, remembers The Weegee Portfolio Inc and its short, troubled history. Sid Kaplan will be in Newcastle upon Tyne for the exhibition opening.
Sid Kaplan in his darkroom, 2008
AN INTRODUCTION
Weegee, the photographer whose images came to define New York in the 1930s and 40s, was born Usher Fellig, 1899, in modern day Ukraine. He became Arthur Fellig when the family came to the America in 1909. Working for Acme Newspictures, in the darkroom, then as a news photographer specialising in fires, crashes and murders, he was nicknamed Weegee - a reference to the Ouija board and an uncanny skill at being in the right place when a story broke. He lived behind New York’s central police station and was allowed to carry a police radio in his car. Enjoying celebrity, one of his photographic stamps the legend Weegee the Famous. His first book, Naked City (1945) was a huge success and he sold the name to the Jules Dassin film of 1948, which it inspired. Weegee’s People (1946) built on that reputation and in the late 40s he worked on a retainer for PM Newspaper. Following his taste for celebrity, he published Naked Hollywood in 1953. He died in 1968.
On 18th April 1980 Weegee’s widow Wilma Wilcox formed The Weegee Portfolio Incorporated, with Sidney Kaplan (printer), Aaron Rose & Larry Silver (distributors), to create an exclusive collection of photographic prints made from Weegee’s original negatives. They are considered the best prints of Weegee work ever made. The group produced 25 portfolios, each containing 49 images. Sid Kaplan was helped in the printing by Anna Mogyorosy and Aaron Rose. Many other images were considered and printed. It was suggested that each portfolio might have 50 prints, the last in each edition being a wild card, but the idea was dropped. The portfolio prints carry Weegee and Sid Kaplan stamps. A very small number seem to carry an embossed Weegee Collection stamp.
The portfolio was launched at the Daniel Wolf Gallery in New York in 1981. Sid Kaplan remembers only one sale and The Weegee Portfolio Inc was disbanded in some acrimony in 1982. Under the agreed terms, each member retained a full portfolio in recognition of their contribution to furthering the work of Weegee. The rest of the images were moved from Aaron Rose’s loft into storage with the rest of the Weegee Collection at Manhattan Moving & Storage on East 80th Street.
Murray Martin & Wilma Wilcox, Whitley Bay, 1980s
In 1986, Weegee’s friend and fellow photographer Louis Stettner worked with Wilma editing the portfolio down to 45 images and packaging it in a box with an introduction he wrote. There was a court case suing the storage company for water damage to some of the collection, but it is not clear whether any portfolio images were damaged. In 1988, at Wilma’s request, Murray Martin (Amber/Side Gallery) brought two large suitcases of Weegee’s work, including a number of portfolios to Newcastle upon Tyne. Side Gallery had organised the first tour of Weegee’s work in 1980 and Murray had helped with the German publication Weegee’s New York (Schirmer/Mosel, 1982) and Amber already held some work. It’s not entirely clear whether the Amber portfolios came at that time or earlier, but the film and photography collective handled European rights and sales on Wilma’s behalf. Murray helped Wilma draft the will that left the bulk of the Weegee Collection, including negatives and rights, to New York’s International Center of Photography. She gave Amber all the work in their possession to be used to support the group’s work and further the awareness and appreciation of Weegee’s photography.
KING WEEGEE
Sid Kaplan: The first time I ever heard of Weegee was maybe when I was about 12 or 13 years old, looking through one of the photo annuals. They did a lot of photography annuals back then. There was a picture in there titled Weegee and Friend, the way he’s been stereotyped: right next to a very, very good looking woman in a swimsuit on the beach somewhere in California. I did find out later that it was Peter Gowland that took the picture, so it was one of his models. In the 40s and 50s he was a very well known girl and cheesecake photographer. At the time I was mostly interested in the photographic technique. In all those photo annuals there was always some there. Of course, I did also look at the women, but that was the first time I heard of him. And later on through photo magazines I did see pictures of his which were real good.
King Weegee
So fast forward... They used to have an organization in town called the PMDA, I think it was, Photographic Manufacturers’ and Distributors’ Association, where they would set up a convention showing off their latest software, their hardware, their chemistry. Whatever had to do with image making at that time, they had a booth there. There was one of the booths called Wabash - they manufactured flash bulbs - and they had a little booklet called Weegee’s Secrets. I was about 13, maybe 14. Maybe it was the first year of high school, but I knew who Weegee was. I don’t know how many dozens of times I read Weegee’s Secrets, every page of it. And I always put in my Wabash number 11 flash bulb at that time. You know, in the text it was always - I couldn’t have gotten this picture without the Wabash flash bulbs, because that’s the one that never failed. Weegee was there signing books: it was being billed as Come and meet King Weegee and he was sitting on a throne and he had that 4 x 5 speed graphic with the Wabash flash bulbs in there. And if you had any questions that Weegee could answer with the time he was able to write his name and the big line that was there, well...
I walked up to Weegee like a kid would walk up to Babe Ruth. He was one of my biggest heroes and so that’s the first time I met him. I was part of a juvenile club with the Police Athletic League, which was a New York institution for kids so they wouldn’t get in trouble on the street. They had a camera club and at that same expo they had an exhibition, and people would vote for what they thought was the best picture. There was some very serious prizes like a couple of rolls of film or maybe some Wabash flash bulbs. Weegee started coming by because he was maybe between shows and we started talking to him and of course he voted for what he thought was the best picture, which happened to be one of mine and I thanked him and he said something to the effect of Kid, you gotta good future ahead of you, and then very, very deadpan, Hey kid, tell me, have you ever thought about stamp collecting? The prize was a DeJour exposure meter, which, at the time, I thought it was kind of an insult. You know, Real men don’t need light meters! If you can’t judge your own exposure without a light meter you don’t deserve to have to have a picture.
The way it was with the photography community, our paths were constantly crossing. There was a Village Camera Club, where Weegee was not a member, but he would like going to the meetings. Most of the time he knew the guest speaker and it was a hangout. After the camera club broke up, they would go to a coffee house/photo gallery called The Limelight. I called him Weegee and then I got a little bit bolder and called him Uncle Weegee, which he didn’t say anything about, but he did not give me a nice look.
Wilma [Wilcox] was in the Photo League, but it disbanded around this time, because, you know, with the pictures they were taking, they had to be communist... So for a social thing they all kind of started drifting toward the Village Camera Club. I guess like everybody else you need some kind of social life to hang out in. Weegee and Lisette Model were always talking. He would acknowledge me - Get outta here, kid! kind of thing. Lisette, at that time, I don’t know, she probably knew me for what I was: this crazy Jewish kid from the Projects. I didn’t know, at the time, she was some kind of countess. I went to what they called Vocational High School, which basically said: These kids, we don’t know if they’re going to make it in the academic world, so maybe we should teach them some kind of a trade so they won’t be a burden on society. They had dark rooms and, as soon as I got out of school, I had the camera and I was going through the streets, exploring, taking pictures, whatever I could do, not to go home for as long as possible, because home life was not that conducive to wanting to be there. Exploring the city was a very good excuse.
Simply Add Boiling Water
Sometimes I’d see some of Weegee’s pictures and I immediately knew what street corner it was. The identity with his work was always there. But I was constantly running into him and after a while he kind of got used to me. At the time also he was working on a project called The Village. And for me, the Village was a very hip place to be. I was there with the camera and I started taking pictures in the area and Weegee was photographing the same areas: the coffee houses, not so much the bars, but there were lots of chess houses, poetry reading places and, of course, Washington Square Park. There was always events happening there. And also with the same people, a big thing was pay-the-rent parties, where there would be music and wine and just pay something at the door because they needed the money for the rent. So I would go to a lot of pay-the-rent parties and take pictures there and at two of them, Weegee was also there photographing. The only difference was, I knew too many people there, and I would join them eventually in the corner sipping cheap wine and maybe forgot about taking pictures after a while. So I would constantly run into him in those places too and by that time he knew I was taking pictures and so that was, that was chapter one.
ENCOUNTERS IN THE PHOTO DISTRICT
Sid Kaplan: OK, so chapter two. It’s now June ‘56, I’ve just graduated high school and it’s either find a job or go to the military, so I wind up in a small studio in what is called the Theatre District on 46th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenue. Weegee was living on 47th between 9th and 10th, so he was in the neighbourhood too. One of the big cottage industries at the time was girlie pictures. Playboy magazine just came out and the amount of money that Playboy was paying for the centrefolds, I think it was $300 back then, a lot of photographers wanted to get a piece of that kind of money. The place I was working in, a lot of similar places where they were real hurting for money, they tried working into it. Photographers would come in, maybe 15 or 20 of them and there’d be a seamless background and a naked or a semi-naked girl would come on the thing and they would all congregate and get angles of them.
Most of them, when they had cameras, I don’t think they knew how to use it or if there was film in it, they just wanted to get a good peep at what was going on, but with everybody putting some money into the pot, they were able to pay the girl and maybe have some expenses left over. And Weegee loved going into those places. And if the word was out that Weegee was going to be there, a lot more people would come in. So there was 3 studios that I knew of that he was doing that to. Well, my job there was rolling down the seamless paper and I had a light meter and if somebody would say, I got ASA 200 film, I would say look at the light meter and say, 1/60th at F5, or 6 or something like that. And Weegee was also taking pictures there and out of the corner of my eye what I saw him doing was, he was taking pictures of all these guys with the cameras jockeying for position and off on the side was the model. Weegee was also starting a magazine called Night and Day and, meeting some of these girls there, he was able to say Hey! We’re doing something, wanna do some private pictures? or something like that.
Anyway, the studio job I was doing, the only problem was I wasn’t getting paid. So I wind up in a studio, working as an assistant, right by the 59th Street Bridge, for a photographer doing commercial work at the time and to help to pay some of the expenses, there was another photographer sharing the studio, whose work I knew and loved and respected. I’d seen his work in the photo magazines, I really thought he was good, it was Lou Stettner and he had an assistant by the name of Aaron, as in Rose. That was in 1957. Stettner was having some problems financially and he couldn’t pay Aaron any more and Danny, the guy I was with, he wasn’t as busy as he thought, so him and Lou Stettner decided what they were going to do is share an assistant.
Well, I had no idea at the time that Stettner and Weegee knew each other, but Stettner was always on the phone and he’s saying Weegee is sick, and He’s in the hospital. Him and Stettner were pretty close. They would go to a druggist to get Weegee’s prescriptions filled and, as the assistant, I was the guy to run it down to Weegee’s house. Well the first time I walk in there, Weegee sees me, You’re Stettner’s assistant? So he was maybe a little bit more polite. I guess he was the first guy who I ever seen that got sick and went through a very accelerated ageing machine, very accelerated. He looked old. I guess he lost a lot of weight, because his clothes were hanging off him. It had something to do with the brain I think. A tumour. At the end that’s what did him.
Stettner didn’t like New York, so he went off to go back to Paris or Spain or something like that and I didn’t see him for quite a few years. By that time the other guy and Stettner, they were finding out that maybe I was more of a liability than an asset. At the time, you know, when you’re 19 years old, I guess you’re a lot smarter than you should be. You knew all the answers and nobody could tell you anything. But it was good working for Stettner, because the work he was doing was illustrating girls romance magazines, I’m in love with this guy and he thinks more of his car than me or something. Lou would have to read the story and come up with some sort of photo illustration for it. So going with him on some of those locations were fun. Seeing the way he’s trying to do something to get the expression out of the models. It was a good experience, but then he upped and went to Europe and I didn’t see him for quite a few years. At the time I was already working in another big photo lab in the photo district, so, again, I would always run into Weegee. We both liked the same automat on Times Square and we’d run into each other sometimes late at night there. I’ve already made 20 or 30,000 prints. I know what I’m doing and I’m starting to get a little bit more upgraded jobs. The lab was doing an exhibition for Expo 67, in Montreal, and Weegee had a couple of prints in it. We needed the negative, so he came up to the lab personally and we start talking and the boss says Hey! you know crazy Weegee? There was the Coney Island negative and then there was the kid looking down on the fire escape. I forgot the third one, but, of course, Weegee said, Be careful of these negatives! And with the kid looking down on the fire escape, there was an area in the frame that he would have cropped anyway and was gonna be cropped in the exhibition, and he just took a regular pen and wrote his name right on it and I’m thinking, God, that’s a little bit sacrilegious! And he was going to do it with the Coney Island negative, but he said, Be careful of losing it, because I can’t crop anything off it.
Coney Island
If you see the original negative, there were spots of sun. What we had to do, to make all the people from corner to corner look even, was a lot of burning and dodging, so some of the dark areas might be a little bit lighter than it should be and some of the bright areas to make it balanced had to be burnt down a little bit more than it should have. Needless to say he was a little bit surprised that I was the guy making the exhibition prints. What finally happened, I left the Times Square area and started my own thing on 23rd Street – my own studio, my own darkroom. One of the problems on 23rd Street, after a certain time, everything closed up, there was no place to eat, but I just happened to know that Times Square automat that was open all night. So I started running into Weegee and I told him, Well, I started my own place, I had too much with that place, time to move on. And then he says to me, What’s the biggest size print you could make? And I said, Well, there’s 16 x 20 and the biggest 20 x 24. And he made sure before we split that he had my phone number, there’s something he wants to do and he’ll call me. Of course I didn’t hear from him and one day I was going into the camera store and one of the salesmen behind the counter says, According to the newspaper they’re burying our friend Weegee today. And they said The Times gave him a very dignified obituary and that was the end of Weegee.
Weegee, himself, the way he was perceived by a lot of people, my generation, the people that were kids or young adults during World War II, they perceived him as a sloppy old man. There was all kinds of jokes about you could smell his cigar and you knew he was around. With the women he did meet, he would say things like, You’re just the kind of woman I’m looking for, somebody with a strong body and a weak mind. Some people referred to him as a try-sexual, whatever that meant. His clothes were a couple of sizes too big and Naked City and the work he did was basically forgotten about for a long time. I guess it was a very similar thing like The Americans, where the first 15 years of it got remaindered off the bookshelves and unceremoniously disappeared. I guess the same thing happened to Naked City.
THE WEEGEE PORTFOLIO INC
Sid Kaplan: Somewhere in the mid-60s I’d run into Weegee and I said, Weegee have you heard anything from Lou Stettner?and he said, Oh yeah, he’s back in town, I’ll give you his number, and that’s when I reconnected again with Lou Stettner. Lou Stettner, at the time, didn’t have the darkroom, so I was working with him in my new darkroom and one day I get a call from Lou that he was speaking to Wilma, who I didn’t know, and she’s in charge of the Weegee thing, and would I do what you can to help her.
She said, she went to Weegee’s funeral on crutches and then she had some kind of leg operation and had to keep off her legs for a couple of years but now she feels better and it’s time to start working on Weegee’s stuff. So when she brought me into the darkroom for the first time, it was not only the way Weegee had left it, but the chemistry in the trays was all crystallized, loads of his cigar butts were still in the ashtray overflowing and the enlargers were still set up like he just took a break working and never came back.
Apparently, he was working in a darkroom with a new project up until the time he died. It had something to do with the caricatures. Distortions. Part of the mystique was that nobody could figure out how he did the distortions, but going into the darkroom for the first time, I saw what he did to modify the enlarger and a good piece of the puzzle made sense. He slit the bellows to get things between the negative and the lens. The trapdoor. Of course a lot of the distortion negatives when it was printed full, not cropped down to the distortion, that made a lot of sense also. Most of the people that he did were famous people, movie stars, politicians and apparently a lot of the negatives weren’t his. He got an 8 x 10 glossy of somebody because, up until he died, he knew all the people in the newspapers and the press organizations so he could just pick prints up without asking if it’s OK or, Yeah, go ahead take it, we’re going to throw it out anyway, kind of thing. So a lot of those they weren’t his negatives that he shot. I think the Marilyn Monroe was something he shot.
Wilma has all these negatives totally unorganized. With the exception of his famous ones, or the ones that he got the most requests for, that he kept off to the side, Weegee wasn’t too careful with the negatives and some of them were in paper bags, some of them were in cigar boxes, in used film boxes. And Wilma had to put some kind of rhyme or reason to it.
Weegee knew how to make a good print for reproduction. He spent a lot of years in the darkroom making pictures for reproduction. Meaning he wasn’t thinking how much the print itself looked, he was already thinking of what it’s going to look like when the newspaper screen hits it. He knew how certain things you can’t make so light, or too dark, because the ink would do something bad to it. So if you look at a lot of his prints, especially night pictures where you could say, Well, it looks too grey, he could have made it darker. That’s true. It’s not a beautiful print in the exhibition sense, but when that newspaper screen and ink hits it, it looked perfect. We’d looked at a lot of his photographs of the same negative. No two prints were ever the same. No two crops were ever the same. So I don’t know if he was a good exhibition printer, he was more than adequate for what he needed, when he did 11 x 14s for exhibitions, they were – what’s the word I’m looking for – sufficient? But from one print to the next, totally different.
Anna Mogyorosy: The Stettner book came out in 76 or 77, because of the ICP (International Center of Photography) show. Then came the little Aperture book. I remember meeting Wilma at that time, just before that Aperture book. Because you did most of the prints for that, as far as I remember.
SK: I don’t. There were quite a few prints. I think what was going to happen was Wilma was going to go to Kenya but she’s gonna drop off...
AM: Shopping bags full of negatives.
SK: Shopping bags.
AM: I met Sid. He was my teacher in the School of Visual Arts. When was this, in the 70s, 80s? I don’t remember. But that’s how I knew him.
SK: And maybe a week after we were no longer student/teacher, we found out we liked each other.
AM: we both liked Weegee and after that things just took their own turn. Late ’70s. After the Lou Stettner book and after the ICP show which was at the same time, I think it was ’76, ’77.
SK: I think the big tidal wave started happening with the Schirmer book [Weegee’s New York, Schirmer/Mosel, 1982, Germany]. It was a couple of hundred, 8 x 10s.
AM: You had to print new stuff, because you didn’t have the prints.
SK: I know you and Wilma together were going through boxes.
AM: I numbered all the negatives. I was probably the last person to number the negatives on the outside envelope. There was an AF number which was on the upper left corner, he would write that in with ink on the negative, right?
SK: No, the AF number was his for the holders.
AM: For the holders, right, but also each had a different number, so they were on every corner and then Wilma started number 1 being The Critic, number 2 being Coney Island, something like that. There were like a top 10 and after that, everything else was all over the place.
SK: What she tried doing was making categories like put the fires in one place and kids in another and murders in another...
AM: Circus, all of that...
SK: Right, circus... She started making categories. And then when she finished the category, she continued the numbering into the next category and then two months later, in digging out more things from the closet, there was a whole other box that should have been put in seven categories before.
AM: I have Wilma’s original list, which I just found yesterday. Can you believe that?
SK: And I think the official number was done on the corner of the negative with india ink.
AM: So that, when it would print, it would print white.
SK: So, before all of that we made contacts from number one to whatever. We were getting paid, I guess, by the piece for it, which the price was ridiculously low to start with, because we knew Wilma didn’t have that much money to begin with either, so, of course it was a lot of love behind it.
Pat McCarthy: How did the idea of the Portfolio get born?
AM: I personally think we kept looking at the negatives, the original negatives... if you ever hold that Critic negative in your hand, that’s it. You can die tomorrow, you know?
The Critic
SK: At my place, there was always activity going on, different visitors, all hours of the day and one of the visitors late at night was a cousin I had who was also a photographer. And he comes in and he sees all these Weegee pictures and I say, Yeah, it’s a thing we’ve been working on. It’s a lot of work, da da da... and we forgot about it. A couple of days later, in the middle of the night, I get a phone call and he says, I had this great idea. I was talking to Aaron [Rose] and I came up with this idea about a Weegee portfolio. I forgot how it came about, but the other guy Aaron was on the extension and, I have this great idea about a Weegee portfolio, and I said something about Hey, I don’t have the authority, you gotta speak to Wilma. So then they met Wilma and they proposed the idea to her, really genuine and interested, serious and whatever else they thought Wilma would want to hear and, No! No! We’re above board. Before anything is done we’re going to bring a lawyer in to make it a contract of what we all agreed upon. So that’s what they did. They made a contract and everything looked good and the work began.
PM: How did you choose the 49 images?
SK: That’s when the agreements started to disagree. That was the first crack in the dyke. We didn’t know what we were agreeing to, but one of the first advisors we wanted on the project was Lou Stettner, because Lou knew Weegee very well and it would be really good to hear Lou’s advice. For myself and Aaron, he was one of our elder statesmen who we looked up to. Lou didn’t want any part of it and, but he did give us a very, very good piece of advice and that was there’s no such thing as Weegee’s best because if you put a number on it, all you’re doing is showing one good facet in favour of eliminating another good facet. So that was a very good piece of advice. So again, I don’t know when the selection started but… I’m sorry.
AM: I don’t know what’s better, to look at the negative or look at the print. I think the negative is better. It’s one step closer, you know.
SK: The negative itself is a work of art.
AM: He used to cut out bright lights or something. Remember he used to make cut outs because the negatives were too black or too white or whatever. There’s one of Louis Armstrong and there’s a big thing cut out on top where there was a light bulb. So it would print, so it wouldn’t print as a light bulb. Easy. And he masked a lot of his stuff.
SK: By looking through all the negatives all the secrets come out.
PM: We were dealing with how the selection was made, with a little additional question as to why 49.
SK: OK. We stopped. Well, near the end we had to stop somewhere. Another idea in the packaging - it never happened – was, in addition to the 49, we did a lot of other negatives that were never used for the portfolio and the idea would have been to bring it up to 50 and, to make each one a little unique, there was the 50th one, which would be the wildcard. We came up with that idea afterwards, because I don’t know how many other prints we printed and scrapped for one reason or another. But getting back to what you asked about the 49, if need be we could have 3 series of 7 each. You remember we were talking about a series with one group and then another group and if we did a series of 7, with 7 in it...
AM: It was just a number that came out right.
SK: Right. Either it could be divided into 7 groups of 7, or we used the 50th one as the wildcard in the deck. All of those ideas evolved. It just didn’t happen with a designated plan. But that was the first crack in the dyke because, when we were looking at it, Aaron and myself were more in the same headset. Aaron and I have been talking about Weegee when we were kids still, Aaron knew him also and he knew about Weegee and a little bit about his work and the thing we agreed upon, with Lou’s advice about how you could never pick the best ones, was that his best work was from the Naked City to Weegee’s People. Weegee’s biography – Weegee on Weegee – he even said, after when the war was over, something changed in his work, so we agreed that his best work was the Naked City and the Weegee’s People.
The third partner in the thing [Larry Silver] was more of a business man, a packager, how to make money. And some of, his idea what should have been in, were not Weegee’s classics but, People would rather hang a picture of this on the wall than somebody being killed or murdered. He wasn’t too knowledgeable about Weegee’s body of work. From his perspective, he may have a whole different idea than I’m saying, but I’m trying to be kind to him 25 years after the fact. But throughout the whole selection we kept remembering what Lou said.
AM: Also I think, when we looked at the negatives, we looked at the full image which has not really been printed and it sure makes a difference. It focuses your eye right to where he wants it.
SK: The negatives were different, sure. You look at his prints and each one is different. The croppings are different too.
AM: He processed them in the back of his car or in a darkroom at, like, PM or something.
SK: When they got reproduced in magazines or a newspaper they cropped it to either fill a page, or a certain space they gotta cover. So nobody ever really saw the full negative on anything.
AM: It was like in the movies nowadays, instead of the TV format, how they crop the top and bottom. It was like cinemascope. It was unbelievable, because there was so much action on the left and the right. Easter Sunday in Harlem was one and The Critic was the other one amongst many, many more.
PM: The other one I think is really amazing is the kids sleeping on the fire escape and you see the guy with the lights.
Heatspell
SK: I saw him do that a couple of times. Weegee would take a picture of somebody in a dark place and he would say Hey, light the match or the lighter! and he would focus on the where the light was. I think what he did with the kid with the flashlight, put it right on the kid and that girl and that’s where he focused.
AM: That’s one of his first pictures that was published in PM. I think the very first might have been the Coney Island I’m not quite certain but I think it was in 1940 or maybe very late 1939. PM had the best staff photographers you could name. Margaret Bourke-White was on the staff, so was Eugene Smith, Morris Engel, David Haver, who no one talks about but you know, he was a good photographer. They were all professionals. So he was in good company at PM. And it was a fabulous paper. It was a very progressive paper. A lefty, pinko kind of paper, you know. So during the war it was anti-Hitler obviously. They had the best writers, Hemingway wrote, Ben Hecht from his newspaper in Chicago and Dr Seuss wrote articles and drew pictures. It lasted four good years and then it vanished. It was over. After the war, that kind of life sort of faded away. It died in ’48, but it was also killed off by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late ‘40s but by then it wasn’t its old self. For the first 3 years it was unique, like having a web page now or something.
SK: Weegee was on retainer, which meant they needed pictures every day and there were lots of days where there was nothing happening and that’s when he had to fill up the space with human interest – things like Coney Island in the Winter or Kids in the Movie House with the infrared film. He had to keep doing pictures even if there wasn’t a fire or an accident. So that’s where a lot of other things came from...
The portfolio was a continuation from the Schirmer. The size was different and another good thing too, with the Schirmer book we had to do all these prints over again and you always make a better print and you’re a lot more familiar with the negative the second time around. So that helped a lot also, remembering what had to be done the last time.
AM: Everything was full negative.
SK: We made 25 portfolios. We had to make extras...
AM: Yeah, we made extra sets. Or partial sets. I’m not sure if they were full sets.
SK: Aaron said it was important that we have extra prints, in case the people that have the portfolios have an accident, we could replace it with a new one.
PM: And you two worked together in the darkroom?
AM: And Weegee, of course, was there too. You find out so much about him, just his negatives, holding it, his fingerprints on them and ashes, and whatever.
SK: For each picture, if there were 50 sheets of paper in a box we know we know we didn’t go beyond 50. And maybe we went through 10 sheets of paper to get the right exposure and what to burn. And then again, if we had 40, then the first thing we did was, well: of the 40, which were the 10 worst prints? And you know there were probably some stains on some and creases on others. There were drying problems and I don’t know what else. But at the end of everything there were 25 good prints and we stored them at Aaron’s loft, ’cos he had a very big space.
AM: I ended up spotting all the prints, so I know them intimately, fingerprints, everything. The whole thing took a long time. I think the printing took over a year or two. And then, after that, by the time the show was at the gallery, at what’s his name’s gallery, Daniel Wolf’s gallery, was that several years?
SK: Daniel Wolf Gallery... At that time it was on 724 5th Avenue, I think. It was a very good opening. But somewhere along the line we made the decision only to package 6 of them. Wolf got me off to the side and said, You’re not gonna sell anything, Aaron’s asking for too much money. So nothing was sold. Wilma was back from Kenya and then I think she was going back to Kenya again and that’s when everything went to storage.
AM: I think you got into a fight with Larry and everybody, whatever.
SK: That was the final dissolution of the thing.
PM: Once the Portfolio Incorporated was dissolved, there was more activity around the portfolios, which is to do with Lou and Wilma.
SK: I did what I do best: mind my business – stay out of it!
AM: I think they donated sets. The V & A has one, I think. What else? The ICP? [International Centre of Photography, New York].
PM: The ICP say they haven’t got a full portfolio set.
AM: I believe that! There was a little fox thief going around taking prints out of boxes.
PM: I’m interested in knowing when you first met Murray [Murray Martin of Amber/Side Gallery].
SK: Wilma called me, that she got a letter from England or a phone call from England from a fella named Murray Martin that’s interested in getting Weegee prints. Murray and I spoke a lot on the phone. I went to Newcastle to print the Survival Programmes for him [Survival Programmes: In Britain’s Inner Cities, Exit Photography Group – Chris Steele-Perkins, Paul Trevor, Nicholas Battye – Side Gallery 1982]. He was a diplomat, an arbitrator. When we wanted to dissolve the whole portfolio thing, that was the one thing we were definitely in agreement with: we wanted out of it. He was very good. Wilma invited him over. He got each of us individually, to find out each side of the story. It went on for a while but he was he was very good, the way he did it. There was a lot of anger, a lot of bad feelings. But then, in retrospect, you’ll look at it and say it’s just another business deal that didn’t turn out the way you expected it. And whatever the politicking was about will be forgotten about and people will look at the work and what he did and say, This guy Weegee was something else! That would be the big thing.
Between us, myself and the other guys I don’t think the relationship was ever the same after that. And you know, then after a while you just stop being angry and you just say hey, that was 25 years ago and we gotta go on. For a long time I just said, I’m gonna walk away. I can’t think about it. I just wanna walk away from it. And then Murray came back about a year later and that’s when I got my box in Wilma’s house from Murray, which until last night I never opened it. I didn’t count to see if there was 49. And if it’s only 48 I’d never figure out which one was missing.
Four Bodies at the Lot of the Smiling Irishman
I don’t know what Lou and Wilma’s logic was in the reducing the portfolio to 45 pictures. I know there’s one of them about Down with the Japs where he said it would be offensive to the Japanese... And I think the Smiling Garage thing – I don’t know who made the decision on it, but it was the wrong decision, because to make the Smiling Garage right, we had to print the negative backwards, because it’s a reflection in a mirror. But the other two, I have no idea. You’re talking about The Lady in the Phone Booth?
PM: And one of my favourites is the Projector Beam. I can’t understand why that was edited out.
SK: I think the reason with The Lady in the Phone Booth is we’d done another... the cross dresser in the paddy wagon. Teeing this other one with the lady all made up, Aaron’s comment was They’re both not real. As far as the prints go, Aaron was one of the unsung heroes behind the scene. Because there was a technique that went back into the 30s called Neococcine. It was a red dye that they put on the negatives in certain black areas, in detailing black areas that you couldn’t have done otherwise. And he worked unbelievable with that red dye pulling out black areas that couldn’t have been done in the darkroom with a little brush. There was one picture of the Hassidic Jews listening to Roosevelt – every piece of tile was neococcined to get it out. And the cannon – somebody getting blown out of the cannon? To embellish the smoke even more than would have been possible with the negative... Oh, I’m sure there was so many others where you know by using that red dye you could get into the blacks that you couldn’t have otherwise. So as far as the actual production goes in getting the quality better, he had a very important role to play in it too.
PM: What does he feel about the portfolios now?
SK: He says it was more than 25 years ago, let’s forget about it and move on. What he did with his portfolio was give it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
PM: The letter I showed you, that Wilma wrote to Murray, is ’88 – Wilma sounding...
SK: Distraught.
PM: She’d been deserted, and, Where are you? And there’s been a moisture problem in the storage and I’ve brought everything back... Murray just got on the next plane and came to see her, she sounded so, so desperate really. Then he brought back to Amber these two enormous suitcases with some portfolios and the stamps and some 8 x 10s. As far as I’m aware, they were all to be stored with us. And Murray was handling sales with 50% going to Wilma and to her educational charity in Kenya.
AM: I didn’t know that.
PM: So what did you go on to do after the portfolios?
AM: I had Weegee fever. I was really sick. I spent my time in the New York Public Library’s newspaper collection. I decided to look at every single issue of PM, from day one and write down the articles that Weegee wrote, and write down the captions and if it appeared in Naked City or Weegee’s People, what page. I was doing it on nothing, I had no money so I bought two reels of microfilm and Sid and I printed some of the images, some of the full size, 11 x 14 images of PM as it was published. So we had that. It’s very hard to get original PMs. I have one but it looks like, you know, if I touch it it’s going to crumble. So it’s all on microfilm. But you know, he wrote almost as good as he shot.
PM: How long did your Weegee fever last.
AM: It’s still on, but it’s in remission.
The Paddy Wagon