Dames! Stiffs! Mugs!

By Richard Lacayo

Some photographers are the poets of purple mountains' majesty. Some are the poets of the placid suburbs. Weegee is the poet of small-timers who died facedown on a city pavement at 3 a.m. in a pool of their own blood. And petty mobsters. He was great at petty mobsters--half the guys in his pictures look as if their nickname was Mugsy. As one of the most unabashed tabloid-news photographers, Weegee was also supremely good at car crashes, dazed escapees from tenement fires, transvestites being hustled out of paddy wagons, and Peeping Tom shots of lovers wrestling in twos (and threes!) on the nighttime beach at Coney Island.

His prime years, from the mid-1930s to the late '40s, were the formative days of tabloid photography. The work Weegee did then makes up the better part of "Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama," the affecting and sizable (more than 200 prints) show on view at the International Center of Photography Midtown in New York City through Feb. 22. Accompanied by Weegee's World (Bulfinch; 262 pages; $75)--probably the fanciest book ever devoted to a man who generally had a cigar stuck in his mouth--the exhibit moves on later to Paris and London.

Think of Weegee as a chronological and psychological midpoint between two utterly different photographers. One is the turn-of-the-century muckraker Jacob Riis, who saw New York City as a social problem to be solved. The other is Diane Arbus, who found in the city life of the 1960s a psychic spectacle of creepy fascination. Weegee haunts the same kind of shabby neighborhoods that Riis did. But what goes on in Weegee's festive, suffering, unsanitary New York is a sight to be enjoyed more than clucked over. The tenements that preoccupied Riis, a moralist and social reformer, are taken for granted by Weegee, a melodramatist, who treats the city as no more than the staging ground for each night's blunt sensations.

At the same time, Weegee had begun to detect that freakish charge in the metropolitan air that would become the signature mood of Arbus' work. There's a feral quality in a lot of the good citizens of Weegee's New York. You catch it in the gleaming eyes of the kids at a crime scene in Their First Murder; these are children who are thrilled, or at the very least intrigued, by the sight of a dead body. In some of his other people there's a passivity that is no less unnerving. You see it in his picture of Irma Twiss Epstein, a nanny accused of killing a child in her care, whose weird serenity is the precursor of the affectless stare that fascinated Arbus.

There was something of the same slightly menacing feel in a lot of Riis' pictures too--in those gimlet-eyed men he showed lurking around the flophouses where he photographed. But Riis tried to reassure his middle-class audience that these people were "the other half," fishy characters or hapless unfortunates, but in either case nothing like themselves. Weegee knew that his tabloid readers were often not so different from the people in his pictures. And he was sufficiently unmoved by the pieties of concerned photography--let's just say that the nobility of the common man was not one of his big preoccupations--that he didn't hesitate to show people a picture of themselves in all their gamy glory.

It helped, of course, that he was a pretty common man himself. Born Usher (later changed to Arthur) Fellig in 1899, Weegee was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He dropped out of high school, then moved out of his parents' Lower East Side apartment in New York City while still in his teens, spending some time homeless, scuttling through public parks, shelters and menial jobs, all the while hoping for regular work in a photo studio--an ambition he picked up while working as an assistant to an itinerant street photographer. Depending on which story you believe, his nickname was either a smudged version of squeegee--one of his first jobs as a darkroom assistant involved wiping down prints as they came from the developing bath--or he gained it because, like a Ouija board, he could predict where the news would happen and get there first. For a while he played violin accompaniment in theaters that showed silent films. "I loved playing on the emotions of the audience as they watched," he once wrote--an interesting admission, since Fellig would eventually give up the fiddle but not his impulse to woo the crowd.

By the mid-1920s Weegee was working for a photo agency that supplied the morning papers with shots of arrests, car accidents, fires and such from the night before. In the mid-'30s he became a free-lancer. Equipped with a police-radio scanner in his car and the most wonderfully named of all old cameras, the Speed Graphic, he chased down the city at its most scabrous, a place where the chief pastimes were groping and bloodletting and where the main thing to remember was that only the strong survive. Eventually he was also a contributor to the liberal daily PM, which put him in the company of literary tough customers like Dorothy Parker and Dashiell Hammett and which reproduced Weegee's prints in a way that did justice to their tar-pit blacks.

By 1947 Weegee's great run was over. Some of his work had found its way into the Museum of Modern Art, and he had collected his best pictures into his best book, Naked City, and sold the title to the movies. (Jules Dassin used it for a hard-boiled crime film that was shot on location in New York City, a Weegee-flavored novelty in those days, when nearly everything was made on a studio sound stage or back lot.) Around the same time, Weegee entered a short-lived marriage and moved to Hollywood for a few years, where he played bit parts in B-movies and took candid shots of the stars. Some of them, like his Hollywood Babylon-ish picture of Jayne Mansfield with her teeth and her bra in full forward thrust, have the lowdown feel of his tenement days. But when he came back to New York in 1952, he didn't understand the postwar city of slum clearance and social workers, the one that the Jews and the Irish and the Italians were all leaving for the suburbs. So Weegee moved on too. Until his death in 1968, he devoted himself to 16-mm film projects and darkroom tricks that turned people into fun-house mirror caricatures, work of a kind that had been done earlier by Andre Kertesz and more effectively by Bill Brandt.

But for those 10 or so great years, Weegee raised voyeurism to an art. As it happens, it's an uncomfortable art that takes a good part of its charge from our guilty fascination with the misfortunes and grotesqueries of others. Much of the time, Weegee is the poor man's Zapruder, the guy at the scene when the blood is still flowing, recording desperate moments that we can't help wanting to see for ourselves. His picture Victim of Auto Accident Waiting for Doctor is compelling not just because of the jagged diagonal slash of the composition but because it's a picture of a real person boxed into real agonies while some stranger pops a flashgun in her face. Four months after the death of Princess Diana, the picture is impossible to look at without thinking of what it cost the woman who appears in it. All the same, we don't care--not looking at it is impossible too.

By now Weegee's unsentimental views have been institutionalized as another kind of sentimentality--tough-guy picturesque. He's the Norman Rockwell of the Ratso Rizzos, the Currier & Ives of the roughnecks. He took his share of kids at the circus and sweet old couples, but the images we love him for are the ones that flesh out our film-noir fantasies. They reassure us that the bad news of our own tabloidy times is just the recurrence of something eternal in human nature. Weegee's world is one where the cops have just beaten the suspect, where the crowd leers at the beauty queen and where the accused nanny gazes into the camera. His world is lustrous, crowded, carnal and guilty. Sound familiar?