Weegee and Brassaï: Two great night shooters

First of all, Happy Fourth of July, because you don't have to be American to enjoy good fireworks. The photo above is a bit of Thursday's pyrotechnics in South Philadelphia.

Second, here's my newest book, arrived in the mail yesterday. Weegee is the most famous of crime photographers, and his work continues to appear on crime novel covers and at least one Noir at the Bar poster to this day.

Two initial observations: Weegee (pseudonym of Arthur Fellig, b. 1899, d. 1968) apparently wrote his own copy to accompany the photographs in Naked City, the 1945 collection that made his name. The writing is rough, vigorous, and at times melodramatic, just like the American movies of the 1940s that would later be called film noir.  And it's a hell of a lot more refreshing than the elevated twaddle that museum curators, art critics, and artists themselves often use.

I also liked the simplicity of Weegee's photographic technique, as outlined in the book's final chapter, called "Camera Tips."  His exposure time, he says, was always 1/200 of a second. He always shot with a flash bulb. He always used the same aperture, except for close-ups, when he stepped it down by half. And those apertures were small, which allowed maximum depth of field. That means he was ready for anything, that he let his camera serve him rather than vice versa.  This is a book I will read as well as look at.

By Weegee

By Brassaï

The Wikipedia entry on Weegee says he "can be seen as the American counterpart to Brassaï, the 20th-century photographer famous for his nighttime photographs of Paris. I bought a book of Brassaï's work earlier this week, and I'd never have made the connection. But Wiki could be right.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Guthrie and Weegee

(Cop Killer (left) Weegee; negative, January 16, 1941, print, about 1950, © International Center of Photography)

The cover of Allan Guthrie's Two-Way Split is taken from one of the great crime photographs, Weegee's Cop Killer, though the borrowing from Weegee is unacknowledged, as far as I can tell.

The designers hired by Point Blank Press colorized the photo in hot reds and yellows, flipped it, cropped it, and jacked the contrast up to emphasize splashes and ominous blotches on and around the cop killer and the arresting officer.

It's an evocative photograph, eliciting pity for the beaten suspect even as one thinks of the horror of his deed, his desolation highlighted by the facelessness of his custodians. And that makes it a pretty good cover for an Allan Guthrie novel.

(For more on Weegee, click here. For more on Allan Guthrie, click here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

More on Weegee's world of crime

(Simply Add Boiling Water, Weegee, 1937; print, about 1950 Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography)

I found an exhibition catalogue Tuesday evening called Weegee's New York that displays the Cop Killer photo on its cover but gives a date of 1939 rather than 1941. (I suppose there are at least three ways to date a documentary photo: by the date of the event, by the date of the negative, and by the date of the print.) The catalogue also includes a photograph of what appears to be the same woman shown in the stripper photo from my "Crime pictures at an exhibition" post, but it gives no date, a disappointing omission for an exhibition catalogue.

The book does, however, begin with an epigraph from Walter Benjamin that reads, in part: "[I]s not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? every passerby a perpetrator? Does not the photographer — descendant of augurers and haruspices — uncover guilt in his pictures?"

The introduction also cites the humor of Weegee's captions, those "extravagant, callously written witticisms à la Raymond Chandler."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Crime pictures at an exhibition

(Cop Killer, Weegee, negative, January 16, 1941; print, about 1950
© International Center of Photography)

I illustrated my "Crime songs" post with this photograph by Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, and I've been unable to keep my eyes off the thing since. Now I invite you to join me in considering this striking image.

I suspect that some of you will notice the black and white first, then the haircut and coat of the detective at right and the downcast expression of the man in custody. Like me, you may be struck by how much this looks like a still from a film noir. Except it's not that; it's New York detectives in a police lineup room with a suspect in two real murders, one of a police officer.

Time and nostalgia have taken the edge off many movie images. Weegee's photo restores it.

Here's another photograph credited to Weegee that also resonates of the movies. I don't know when the photo was taken, but the woman has the look of a Hollywood star of the 1940s or '50s. I'm no fashion expert, but the suit of the man shielding his face looks as if it may date from the same time or a bit later.

But no Ava Garder or Rita Hayworth ever showed that much skin on screen, as far as I know. Once again, a photograph restores a gritty edge, an impression of reality, that time, nostalgia and, perhaps, censorship had removed. (I can't find date, copyright and ownership information for this photograph. Can anyone out there supply it?)

Here is a link to Weegee's work available for viewing online. Here's a short biography of the photographer. And here's an excerpt from a book to read as a warning against assuming too easily that photographs and reality are identical.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Crime songs

Cop Killer, Weegee, negative, January 16, 1941; print, about 1950
© International Center of Photography

This one began as a post on Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays and continued in a discussion with one of my colleagues at work. The subject as enunciated by Declan: "songs as condensed crime fiction novels – stripped-back and pared-down narratives about losers, loners and the kind of suckers who never caught an even break."

Bruce Sprinsteen's Nebraska came up, and I am proud to say that one of its crimes ("They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night") happened not far from where I live. Bobbie Gentry’s "Ode to Billie Joe" drew a mention, and someone suggested Richard Thompson's "1952 Vincent Black Lightning."

The first verse of Bob Dylan's "Hurricane," the part before the song turns to crap, has the makings of a crime story, but my contribution on C.A.P. was "Ocultei," recorded by the great Brazilian singer Elizeth Cardoso with a last verse (rendered into English for blogging purposes) that runs tremulously thus:

"And my most ardent desire
– May God pardon me the sin! –
Is that another woman by your side
Kill you in the hour of a kiss."

Now, let's hear from you. What songs would make good crime stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008