Weegee wikipedia
Names make news. It's just a barroom brawl. But if society has a fight in a Cadillac on Park Avenue and their names are in the Social Register, this makes news and the papers are interested in that. A book written about Weegee, Weegee's Secrets published in , says:. This distance was useful for shooting people full-length. He also carried a flashlight for adjusting his camera settings in the dark.
Some of Weegee's photos, like the juxtaposition of society grandes dames in ermines and tiaras and a glowering street woman at the Metropolitan Opera The Critic , , were later revealed to have been staged. In , Fellig became the only New York freelance newspaper photographer with a permit to have a portable police-band shortwave radio. Weegee worked mostly at night; he listened closely to broadcasts and often beat authorities to the scene.
These works were included in its exhibition Action Photography. Advertising and editorial assignments for magazines followed, including Life and beginning in , Vogue. Naked City was his first book of photographs. Film producer Mark Hellinger bought the rights to the title from Weegee. It was based on a gritty story written by Malvin Wald about the investigation into a model's murder in New York.
Wald was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay, co-written with screenwriter Albert Maltz, who would later be blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Later the title was used again for a naturalistic television police drama series, and in the s, it was adopted by a band, Naked City, led by the New York experimental musician John Zorn. According to the commentary by director Robert Wise , Weegee appeared in the film The Set-Up , ringing the bell at the boxing match.
Online biography for kids
Weegee experimented with 16mm filmmaking himself beginning in and worked in the Hollywood industry from to the early s, as an actor and a consultant. Bernard became an ordained orthodox rabbi and kept the Sabbath, even though it hindered him from earning money for his family. To help support the family, Weegee dropped out of school and worked at menial jobs, when he could find them.
One such job was assisting a pony ride photographer.
Weegee arthur fellig biography for kids pictures
Weegee quickly realized that even poor parents would spend money on a photo of their child dressed in their finest clothes on top of a pony. This was his first encounter with photography as a livelihood. The strained relationship between Weegee and his father, even at an early age, stemmed from their different world-views: the son's modern American ideas contradicted the father's Old World, and religious notions.
Eventually the tension became unbearable, and Weegee ran away from home at age He became one of the thousands of children living on the unforgiving city streets, sleeping on park benches, and working odd jobs. Weegee even tried his own hand at the pony ride photography business, which he promptly quit, when he realized that he had to take care of the pony.
He then took a job in , working in the dark room at Acme Newspicture , the leading photo agency at the time that supplied newspapers from across the country with stock photos. The experience provided him with photographic training and instruction. New York City in the mid-thirties, still in the grip of the Great Depression, was a tough place to earn a living.
Prohibition had recently ended and rival gangs fought among themselves to maintain business.
Weegee arthur fellig biography for kids ages
Newspapers sensationalized these "wars" to entertain the Depression era masses. They were constantly in need of pictures to visualize these stories. Weegee, sensing a job opportunity, became a freelance photographer. He worked the New York City streets at night, actively looking for trouble, which made him one of the first crime photographers in the city.
Living in a one room dilapidated apartment across the street from a New York City Police Station, Weegee would bribe the officers to get the scoop on a crime story. His eerie ability to arrive at crime scenes just before the police, led to the rumor that he consulted an Ouija board. As a result, he began referring to himself as "Weegee" supposedly unable to spell Ouija and the nickname stuck.
After fraternizing with the police for two years, Weegee became the first American citizen to have a police radio installed in his car. Rumored to be both a mobile darkroom and an office, his car enabled Weegee to deliver his photographs to Acme "hot off the presses" and in time for the early edition. Weegee worked as a freelance photographer for ten years, submitting photographs to the Herald-Tribune, Daily News, Post, and the Sun, among others.
For a good part of that time, he was a special contributing photographer at PM Daily , from to PM paid him a weekly stipend and paid for each photo that PM purchased, whether or not it was published. Weegee covered an array of stories, but it was his crime photographs that got him the job. His photographs were not only well-received in the popular media, but were respected by the fine art community.
The New York Photo League held an exhibition of his work in Like Lisette Model, Weegee loved New York, which he expressed in his street photographs that focused on the expression and gestures of his subject. The book included gruesome images of murders, alongside images of people enjoying the city's nightlife. It was an instant success, and a Hollywood producer bought the rights to the book's title in The award winning film noir movie, full of murder, suicide, and good detective work found inspiration in Weegee's lurid photos.
However, this supposed biography of New York City was the culmination of Weegee's career. Shortly after its publication, Weegee ceased working as a crime photographer entirely. He produced instead other photo books such as Weegee's People in and Naked Hollywood in Weegee's gregarious and flamboyant personality, dark sense of humor and odd behavior was as shocking as his pictures.
Newspaper readers became eager to learn of the crime photographer's exploits due to the success of Naked City. The self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Photographer" happily obliged his readers, and staged photos of himself posing next to bombs, seated in police paddy wagons, and standing in perp lineups. He was a master of self-promotion and carefully crafted his public persona.
Those who knew Weegee personally described him as a chauvinist with bad hygiene, who spent too much time in brothels, looking for dates with strippers. His wife, Margaret Atwood, was willing to overlook these personality flaws for a short time. Upon introducing himself to her he claimed to have asked, "are you single fully and footloose, Babe?
I'm going to take you under my wing. Weegee eventually found someone accepting of his crude behavior and poor standards of health. Wilma Wilcox was a Quaker social worker with the patience to endure Weegee's unpredictable ways. The life partners never married, but eventually moved in together in when Weegee, diagnosed with diabetes, needed to be cared for.
The allure of Hollywood pulled Weegee to the West Coast in While there, he worked as a technical consultant on films, and even acted in small bit roles. Famed director Stanley Kubrick , also known for his dark humor, asked Weegee to be the still photographer for his Academy award winning film, Dr. Even though busy with work, Weegee hated his time in Hollywood, which he called "the land of zombies.
After five years, Weegee finally had enough and returned to New York in He began exploring the idea of what he deemed "art photography," which entailed manipulating negatives to distort images. Upon seeing this new work, most critics and art lovers concluded the photographer had lost his way. Wee Gee. The film was intended to be a pseudo-documentary of his life, in which Weegee playing himself falls in love with a store mannequin and travels to Paris and London.
Weegee married only once in his life to Margaret Atwood in Weegee never remarried, although his long time friend since the early s Wilma Wilcox remained his close companion until his death. After his death, Wilma continued to promote his work and was chiefly responsible for keeping the Weegee legacy alive. In , the ICP held a Weegee retrospective exhibition.
In the film Public Eye , Joe Pesci stars as a fictionalized press photographer loosely based on Weegee. I always use a flashbulb for my pictures which are mostly taken at night. Even on the few occasions where I have made shots by daylight, I still use a flashbulb. When I am making close-ups at six feet, with the light from the flashbulb closer to the subject and hence stronger, I step down to F32, which compensates if I am a little off in my guess of the distance.
Later on in his career, Weegee would experiment with different 35mm cameras including Leica and Nikon. Weegee would often shot his images in the middle of the night, in complete darkness. He would only discover what he got on film once he processed his images.
Weegee arthur fellig biography for kids
I really seem to be in a trance when I am taking the picture because there is so much drama taking place or will take place. In other words, we have beauty and we have ugliness. In the past twenty-two years, I have taken about ninety-eight percent of my pictures with flash. Practically all were unposed. Far from it… some of the most beautiful pictures in the world are posed… but the only pictures that I like to take are the ones that catch and preserve the movement of life.
These vary with the type and purpose of the photo… there are passport, medical, industrial photos, etc… all intended to do a specific job. A passport photo, for instance, should merely identify someone… it would be foolish to judge it by any artistic standards. Here the important factors are print quality, the proper relationship of light and shadow, composition, etc.
The purpose of this type is decorative and certainly has a place in the modern home. However, [my type of photography] captures a dramatic moment in life.
Biography for 2nd graders: Arthur (Usher) Fellig (June 12, – December 26, ), known by his pseudonym Weegee, was a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography in New York City.
It does the impossible by making time stand still… it freezes an emotion, an event… on film. Most wonderful of all, it has the power to recreate the entire emotional experience many years later. Incidentally, light, shadow, and composition are of secondary importance here. In all my lectures and magazine articles, I always [state] this point. Now just what is this thing called attitude?
Yet, without it, it is impossible to produce a picture that has life. Actually, your attitude is a combination of many things. Good photographs, like good paintings, must be carefully thought out. A nervous photographer not only misses the good pictures but also upsets the subject, so, be at ease… especially in handling the camera. A picture of a tramp sitting on a park bench can be very interesting… sometimes.
This also applies to a picture of a man in high hat and tails. But-snap them both on the same park bench, and you have one of the most forceful, ironical features in photography… contrast. Everything in life is placed against a background like a stage setting. An accident, an event, does not exist in a vacuum… isolated from everything around it.
When you come to a scene you want to photograph, look all around, notice everything. See if there is one thing against which the subject may be photographed that will give punch to the whole picture. Often this can be achieved by actually walking all around the subject, whatever it is, looking at it from every possible perspective, and viewing the subject in relation to the background.
Legacy and Influence. They became pieces of art in their own right, later finding their way into galleries and books. His ability to convey the rawness of urban life and his instinct for capturing stories as they unfolded earned him a lasting place in the annals of photography. His work not only influenced generations of photographers who followed, but also filmmakers, especially in the realm of film noir.
His stark contrasts between light and shadow, his dramatic compositions, and his focus on the darker elements of city life all contributed to an aesthetic that is still admired today. He understood the pulse of New York and captured it like no other. His images told stories that words alone could not, making him a legend in the world of photojournalism and an indelible figure in the history of American culture.
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