Usher (Arthur) Fellig, known as Weegee

gr82bart · Dec 30, 2017

One of my favourites
Recently discovered about 150 rolls of his containing murder scenes
Grisly, shocking, morbid, raw

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kza3mm/grisly-murder-scene-photos-from-1910s-new-york

https://creators.vice.com/en_au/art...from-the-godfather-of-crime-scene-photography

https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/weegee?all/all/all/all/0

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/...egees-new-york-street-photography-in-pictures

http://erickimphotography.com/blog/...eegee-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/

http://www.bjp-online.com/2017/02/weegee/

removed account4 · Dec 30, 2017

i think he made records too, didn't he? like how to spoken word records
so you too could do flashwork &c like him ...
joe pesci did a heck of a weegeeesque guy in public eye ...

AgX · Dec 30, 2017

gr82bart said:
One of my favourites
Recently discovered about 150 rolls of his containing murder scenes
Grisly, shocking, morbid, raw

These photographs were NOT made by Weegee (unless one of his slipped into that collection). But instead are official police photographs.
Weegees age resp. his biography excludes him from taking these photographs too.

AgX · Dec 30, 2017

The vertical photographs shown at that link are quite well made. I do not remember having seen such from that period from police authorities over here. Actually vertical crime scene photographs seem quite rare.

Sirius Glass · Dec 30, 2017

I like WeeGee's work. Crisp, original, some humorous, some sad, and sometime ghoulish.

MattKing · Dec 30, 2017

Weegee was good friends with Stanley Kubrick and shot the stills for Dr. Strangelove.
Some people are full of surprises.

Sirius Glass · Dec 30, 2017

One of his very moving photographs:
http://collection.whitney.org/object/10438

samcomet · Dec 30, 2017

Funny story about Weegee (who was a friend and contemporary of my parents in the newspaper business), is that when he died he left all his belongings to the ICP in NYC and when they uncrated the boxes they found that indeed one of the boxes contained his ashes. A couple of years ago the ICP, in it's old 6th Ave. NYC location, reproduced the room he lived in with the urn on a shelf. It was part of the retrospective of Weegee's work. You can hear him talk about his methodology here. It's a very interesting piece.

Also @AgX in total agreement about the first link to the police photographs. They really do not seem to fit the time period nor the style Weegee. For what it is worth...............
cheers,
Sam

mgb74 · Jan 3, 2018

AgX said:
The vertical photographs shown at that link are quite well made. I do not remember having seen such from that period from police authorities over here. Actually vertical crime scene photographs seem quite rare.

I remember reading that the first documented use of the camera for crime scene photos were by a French photographer (who's name escapes me). And he used a special 4-legged stand to get vertical images.

AgX · Jan 4, 2018

That could have been Alphonse Bertillon.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Bertillon#/media/File:Bertillon,_Alphonse,_fiche_anthropométrique_recto-verso.jpg
(funny that her did not fill-in his profession)

He made crime scene verticals, but got famous instead for his "anthropometric" photography. I myself still saw his posing chair in a belgian police office.

guangong · Jan 4, 2018

samcomet said:
Funny story about Weegee (who was a friend and contemporary of my parents in the newspaper business), is that when he died he left all his belongings to the ICP in NYC and when they uncrated the boxes they found that indeed one of the boxes contained his ashes. A couple of years ago the ICP, in it's old 6th Ave. NYC location, reproduced the room he lived in with the urn on a shelf. It was part of the retrospective of Weegee's work. You can hear him talk about his methodology here. It's a very interesting piece.

Also @AgX in total agreement about the first link to the police photographs. They really do not seem to fit the time period nor the style Weegee. For what it is worth...............
cheers,
Sam

My friend Lou Stettner told me that when working on his Weegee book, that many of Weegee’s negatives were stored at Weegee’s House in a very damp basement, many seriously deteriorated. Weegee himself, according to Louie, was very unsure of pictorial composition. This, of course, does not detract from his accomplishments.
Louie also made an LP, “Famous Photographers Tell How”. Most humorous is the juxtaposition of HCB with his upper class Oxford accent and philosophical comments on the decisive moment and Weegee’s New York accent...an accent almost unheard today: The easiest portrait to take is a corpse ...and goes on to explain why.

mgb74 · Jan 4, 2018

AgX said:
That could have been Alphonse Bertillon.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Bertillon#/media/File:Bertillon,_Alphonse,_fiche_anthropométrique_recto-verso.jpg
(funny that her did not fill-in his profession)

He made crime scene verticals, but got famous instead for his "anthropometric" photography. I myself still saw his posing chair in a belgian police office.

Yes. http://www.history.com/news/a-look-...-photos-that-changed-how-murder-is-documented

cliveh · Jan 4, 2018

When I was about 13 years of age I met Weegee at a local department store in Coventry, England, where he was promoting Zenith cameras. He was smoking a big cigar and let me look through a 500mm lens pointed out the window of the store. There was no one else there and I got to have a chat with him. He probably thought who is this stupid kid interested in photography.

AgX · Jan 4, 2018

I think that promoting of Zenits is not documented so far. Interesting to learn.

jtk · Jan 4, 2018

I was given a "Murder Is my businees" Weegee-quoting t-shirts... I wear it sometimes when I think it would be fun to explain.

Sirius Glass · Jan 4, 2018

cliveh said:
When I was about 13 years of age I met Weegee at a local department store in Coventry, England, where he was promoting Zenith cameras. He was smoking a big cigar and let me look through a 500mm lens pointed out the window of the store. There was no one else there and I got to have a chat with him. He probably thought who is this stupid kid interested in photography.

No, he probably got a kick out of it. He was a very kind man who wanted people to be interested in his work and photography in general.

samcomet · Jan 4, 2018

guangong said:
My friend Lou Stettner told me that when working on his Weegee book, that many of Weegee’s negatives were stored at Weegee’s House in a very damp basement, many seriously deteriorated. Weegee himself, according to Louie, was very unsure of pictorial composition. This, of course, does not detract from his accomplishments.
Louie also made an LP, “Famous Photographers Tell How”. Most humorous is the juxtaposition of HCB with his upper class Oxford accent and philosophical comments on the decisive moment and Weegee’s New York accent...an accent almost unheard today: The easiest portrait to take is a corpse ...and goes on to explain why.

Guangong,
In my post, #8 in this thread, is a link to an audio file which is a transcription of the LP record. It is the underlined word "here" in the sentence that talks about his methodology ............... just in case you were interested in hearing it once again!
cheers,
Sam

Usher (Arthur) Fellig, known as Weegee

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