Many of which centered around murder. Pictures of the dead, pictures of the police at the crime scene, pictures of leering onlookers. He has one picture of kids at a crime scene entitle "Their First Murder."
He was a practical man. "The easiest kind of a job to cover was a murder. The stiff would be laying on the ground."
He began working as a street portrait photographer in 1913. He would travel around with a pony and photograph NYC children on weekends. His biography says the job was short lived due to the expense of caring for the pony.
In 1917 he moved out of the family home to try to make it on his own and took a variety of odd jobs, typical stuff you do to survive, like dishwasher, day laborer - BUT he also worked as a "hole puncher" at the Life Saver factory.
I want that job.
He was also homeless off and on during this period, taking refuge in missions, public parks and railroad stations.
He began his freelance career in 1935, concentrating his focus around Manhattan police headquarters. In 1938 he got permission to install a police radio in his car. This is where his nickname originated. His real name is Usher Fellig. The twist is that he often showed up at crime scenes before the police, so people attributed a super natural kind of thing to him similar to a Ouija board supplying ethereal answers to desperate questions.
He bastardized it and adopted the name Weegee.
In 1941 he opened an exhibition titled "Weegee:Murder is My Business", which still travels the world today.
I must see it. You must see it. The children must see it. Fun for the whole family.
He wrote Naked City, a book that got turned into a movie and won two Oscars.
In the fifties he got into distorted portraits of celebrities and political figures.
To be fair, not all of his stuff revolved around the lurid. In fact quite a bit of it documented life. His catalogue includes a lot of pictures of life in NYC. Some convey the starkness, the delicate equation, of existence as a human being, some expose the pure joy of being a kid.
He published an autobiography in 1961.
Absolutely fascinating to know a human can evolve in this way. He began with an interest in photography, started out with a pony and kids, dug into the murder scene, evolved into the surreal of distorted portraits, wrote a book.
Were the seeds of all this there at birth? Or did they evolve as his brain was assaulted by life?
Who cares? What idiot even asked that question?
Let's just be thankful that a man like this existed as counterpoint to The Boring and The Mundane.
The passion is a big part of the story. The desire, the belief in what he was doing, to push through homelessness and Life Saver factories for the opportunity to express what was in his soul.
That is where the super natural enters into it. Most of us barely have the energy to get up off the couch to make a bologna sandwich.
It also says something that, although he is celebrated for his murder photographs and distorted celebrities, that same mind also was interested in daily life, and in the just plain happiness of being a kid.
Evidence:
Me in 10 years.
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