Weegee

The ultimate collection of Weegee's shocking tabloid photographs, from the ultimate tabloid city.

Naked City

Arthur Fellig

Weegee not only captured the gritty underbelly of New York City in his explosive photographs, but he lived it as well. This long out-of-print autobiography, brought back with complete and unabridged text by Devault-Graves Digital Editions, was written toward the end of Weegee's life before he was the photographic legend he is today. Here he tells the story of how an impoverished Jewish immigrant named Arthur Fellig from Zlothev, Austria, came to grips with one of the toughest cities in the world and made it his own. In wisecracking prose that is a match for his unblinking ferocity behind the camera, Weegee recounts his days of taking tintypes of kids on ponies and how this knowledge of the streets and neighborhoods of New York led to him being the first on the scene of the city's every murder, disaster, and heartbreak. In Weegee: The Autobiography the author candidly and without reserve tells readers about documenting the grisly street executions by Murder, Inc., tenements up in flames, child killers, lovers in the back rows of movie theaters, and the sexual misadventures of streetwalkers, pimps, and transsexuals, all in a voice that had seen it all and loved it all. Fans of Weegee's photography will not want to miss his story-told in the way only Weegee himself could tell. The new Devault-Graves Digital Editions version of Weegee: The Autobiography contains a wealth of new material for readers. An original Afterword by author and critic Ed Ward and extensive annotations and endnotes are included.

The Autobiography (Annotated)

Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), better known as Weegee, was an Austrian immigrant who worked as a freelance news photographer in New York City. Beginning his career on the police beat where he specialized in crime and catastrophe, Weegee roamed the city during the 1930s and '40s in search of the Page One photo: the image that would stop you at the newsstand.He was among the first to fully realize the camera's unique power to capture split-second drama and exaggerated emotion. But his profound influence on other photographers, most famously on Diane Arbus, derives not only from his sensational subject matter and his use of the blinding, close-up flash, but also from his eagerness to photograph the city at all hours, at all levels: coffee shops at three in the morning, hot summer evenings in the tenements, debutante balls, parties in the street, lovers on park benches, the destitute and the lonely. No other photographer has better revealed the non-stop spectacle of life in New York City.Weegee's first book, Naked City (1945), was a runaway success and made him a celebrity who suddenly had assignments from Life and Vogue. By the publication of his second book, Weegee's People (1946, he had cut the wires to his police radio and had begun to photograph the furred and bejeweled grandes dames at the Metropolitan Opera as well as his beloved street people. Naked Hollywood (1953) and Weegee by Weegee (1961) feature portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khruschev, and Liberace—many of them viewed through the distorted lens of his Weegee-scope.Regarded as some of the most powerful images of 20th-century photography, Weegee's work now resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Weegee's People

Miles Barth

Offers a collection of photographs by the controversial photojournalist that chronicles the seamy underside of life in New York City, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Reprint.

Weegee

Books

Your next favorite book is out there