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Weegee: Murder is My Business
Drawn from the International Center of Photography’s archives, this book highlights the incomparable style and fascinating career of Weegee, one of New York City’s quintessential press photographers. For a decade between 1935 and 1946, Weegee made a name for himself snapping crime scenes, victims, and perpetrators. Armed with a Speed Graphic camera and a police-band radio, Weegee often beat the cops to the story, determined to sell his pictures to the sensation-hungry tabloids. His stark black-and-white photos were often lurid and unsettling. Yet, as this beautifully produced volume shows, they were also brimming with humanity. Designed as a series of "dossiers," this book follows Weegee’s transformation from a freelancer to a photo-detective. It explores his relationship with the tabloid press and gangster culture and reveals his intimate knowledge of New York’s darkest corners. It provides readers with a rich historical experience—a New York City "noir" shot through the lens of one of its most iconoclastic figures.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published September 25, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 13, 2016
Editor Brian Wallis smartly opens Weegee: Murder is My Business with an excerpt from the eponymous photographer's titular work on his coverage of the hits committed by Murder Inc. "Each one of their murders was a masterpiece," claims Weegee in that piece - the same could easily be said of his own work.
This lovely volume, put together as part of a show at the International Center of Photography back in 2012, is a riveting look at the life and work of the man who basically invented tabloid journalism. Opening with the aforementioned excerpt, Murder continues with a reproduction of Rosa Reilly's piece on Weegee as a free lance cameraman from Popular Photography in 1937. Having provided snapshot presentations of Weegee-as-perceived-then, the book then provides five different essays by contemporary writers (including the editor) on how a man called Arthur Fellig turned himself into a brand. Eddy Portnoy's piece provides what biographical information is available on the photographer, and works to fill in the gaps of his early life on the lower East side by providing alternate contemporary accounts of what that life might have looked like, while Carol Squiers explains the historical context of gangland violence that gave Weegee so much material to work with. Interspersed amongst these essays are four "dossiers" of photos, gorgeously reproduced, in which the original images are frequently shown in juxtaposition with reproductions of the newspaper articles they appeared in.
Arthur Fellig was a fascinating figure, and as far as I know the only photographer to inspire both an episode of The X-Files and a Jake Gyllenhaal film. Weegee: Murder is My Business offers both a fantastic tribute to his work and insight into the insanity of his life.
This lovely volume, put together as part of a show at the International Center of Photography back in 2012, is a riveting look at the life and work of the man who basically invented tabloid journalism. Opening with the aforementioned excerpt, Murder continues with a reproduction of Rosa Reilly's piece on Weegee as a free lance cameraman from Popular Photography in 1937. Having provided snapshot presentations of Weegee-as-perceived-then, the book then provides five different essays by contemporary writers (including the editor) on how a man called Arthur Fellig turned himself into a brand. Eddy Portnoy's piece provides what biographical information is available on the photographer, and works to fill in the gaps of his early life on the lower East side by providing alternate contemporary accounts of what that life might have looked like, while Carol Squiers explains the historical context of gangland violence that gave Weegee so much material to work with. Interspersed amongst these essays are four "dossiers" of photos, gorgeously reproduced, in which the original images are frequently shown in juxtaposition with reproductions of the newspaper articles they appeared in.
Arthur Fellig was a fascinating figure, and as far as I know the only photographer to inspire both an episode of The X-Files and a Jake Gyllenhaal film. Weegee: Murder is My Business offers both a fantastic tribute to his work and insight into the insanity of his life.
January 29, 2025
“Working the night beat, Weegee specialized in flash photography, a new approach that produced gritty, high-contrast pictures, and he often used this approach to show onlookers’ startled reactions to the dramatic events or deaths confronting them.”
“Weegee’s critical role in the history of photojournalism is often overlooked, yet in the 1930s he pioneered an approach to daily news photography that was largely without precedent. Often reduced to crime photography, Weegee’s work utilized a surprisingly modernistic and technologically advanced approach to the medium. Unlike the avant-garde press photography of the 1920s geared to cosmopolitan middle-class people, the tabloids for which Weegee worked targeted the broad working class. He also set the stage for the public’s growing interest in the process of police work - as opposed to the mystery-solving whodunit - which was relatively recent and became the subject of an entire subgenre of detective fiction and numerous films.”
“If there is a journalistic equivalent of a lousy neighborhood, it could be found in the tabloids, where politics, gossip, sports, the crime blotter, and the comics all vied for space among a plethora of sensational and sometimes grisly imagery.”
“Weegee’s intimate voyeurism and shrugging acceptance of life’s hard knocks constitute a unique approach to documentary photography, one divorced from the reformist zeal of the New Deal thirties yet tempered by the economic trauma of the Depression and an immigrant’s experience of hardscrabble survival.”
“Weegee does offer a few minute details about his father’s job as a pushcart peddler: harassed by the street kids, crooks, and the cops, immigrant pushcart peddlers did not have an easy time of it in New York City. It was often a job of last resort and one that evidently kept the family in a state of privation. His father did not want to own a small shop, so as not to work in a factory on the Sabbath. As a result, Weegee admits to having gone to bed hungry. But for the most part, he leaves the excruciating details of his personal poverty to the imagination. “Many a night I was so hungry that I cried myself to sleep on an empty stomach,” is one of the few revealing comments Weegee makes about his tenement childhood.”
“They tried to shut our eyes. We children did not shut our eyes. We saw and knew.
On sunshiny days the whores sat on chairs along the sidewalks. They sprawled indolently their legs taking up half the pavements. People stumbled over a gauntlet of whores’ meaty legs. At five years I knew what they sold. They were always ready for “business.” Earth’s trees, grass, flowers could not grow on my street; but the rose of syphilis bloomed by night and by day. It is a lesser known fact that Jewish men and women were heavily involved on what was then called “the white slave trade” and that a significant number of Jewish immigrant women worked as prostitutes.”
“In spite of his fondness of school, Weegee was forced to quit at the age of fourteen in order to help put food on the family table.”
“Some critics have attempted to lacquer a Jewish ideological component onto Weegee's images. Daniel Morris argues that work by Jewish photographers is the result of a "Jewish emphasis on witnessing as a form of social responsibility." Echoing this notion,
Samantha Baskind awkwardly wends in the concept of "Tikkun olam," the notion that Weegee's work has an intentional component of social justice built into it because, as a Jew, he was an outsider, and therefore more apt to empathize with other minorities. All of this seems very dubious. Weegee had little use for traditions. Like many American Jews, Weegee’s relationship to Jewishness was an organic affair that manifested itself via his stomach.”
“Weegee provided reading material for “the distracted reader,” one for whom too much text is overwhelming and which allows the reader to jump from image to text and back, all on the same page. Offering readers a kind of literary/visual bazaar that privileged image over text, the tabloids created a space that resembled, to a certain degree, the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the Lower East Side ghetto where Weegee grew up.”
“Weegee’s critical role in the history of photojournalism is often overlooked, yet in the 1930s he pioneered an approach to daily news photography that was largely without precedent. Often reduced to crime photography, Weegee’s work utilized a surprisingly modernistic and technologically advanced approach to the medium. Unlike the avant-garde press photography of the 1920s geared to cosmopolitan middle-class people, the tabloids for which Weegee worked targeted the broad working class. He also set the stage for the public’s growing interest in the process of police work - as opposed to the mystery-solving whodunit - which was relatively recent and became the subject of an entire subgenre of detective fiction and numerous films.”
“If there is a journalistic equivalent of a lousy neighborhood, it could be found in the tabloids, where politics, gossip, sports, the crime blotter, and the comics all vied for space among a plethora of sensational and sometimes grisly imagery.”
“Weegee’s intimate voyeurism and shrugging acceptance of life’s hard knocks constitute a unique approach to documentary photography, one divorced from the reformist zeal of the New Deal thirties yet tempered by the economic trauma of the Depression and an immigrant’s experience of hardscrabble survival.”
“Weegee does offer a few minute details about his father’s job as a pushcart peddler: harassed by the street kids, crooks, and the cops, immigrant pushcart peddlers did not have an easy time of it in New York City. It was often a job of last resort and one that evidently kept the family in a state of privation. His father did not want to own a small shop, so as not to work in a factory on the Sabbath. As a result, Weegee admits to having gone to bed hungry. But for the most part, he leaves the excruciating details of his personal poverty to the imagination. “Many a night I was so hungry that I cried myself to sleep on an empty stomach,” is one of the few revealing comments Weegee makes about his tenement childhood.”
“They tried to shut our eyes. We children did not shut our eyes. We saw and knew.
On sunshiny days the whores sat on chairs along the sidewalks. They sprawled indolently their legs taking up half the pavements. People stumbled over a gauntlet of whores’ meaty legs. At five years I knew what they sold. They were always ready for “business.” Earth’s trees, grass, flowers could not grow on my street; but the rose of syphilis bloomed by night and by day. It is a lesser known fact that Jewish men and women were heavily involved on what was then called “the white slave trade” and that a significant number of Jewish immigrant women worked as prostitutes.”
“In spite of his fondness of school, Weegee was forced to quit at the age of fourteen in order to help put food on the family table.”
“Some critics have attempted to lacquer a Jewish ideological component onto Weegee's images. Daniel Morris argues that work by Jewish photographers is the result of a "Jewish emphasis on witnessing as a form of social responsibility." Echoing this notion,
Samantha Baskind awkwardly wends in the concept of "Tikkun olam," the notion that Weegee's work has an intentional component of social justice built into it because, as a Jew, he was an outsider, and therefore more apt to empathize with other minorities. All of this seems very dubious. Weegee had little use for traditions. Like many American Jews, Weegee’s relationship to Jewishness was an organic affair that manifested itself via his stomach.”
“Weegee provided reading material for “the distracted reader,” one for whom too much text is overwhelming and which allows the reader to jump from image to text and back, all on the same page. Offering readers a kind of literary/visual bazaar that privileged image over text, the tabloids created a space that resembled, to a certain degree, the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the Lower East Side ghetto where Weegee grew up.”
August 13, 2023
This is a fun book about somebody you may not have heard of if you aren't a photographer.
Usher (Arthur) Fellig was an Ukrainian Jew from the NYC Jewish Ghetto of the early 20th Century, who took the name Weegee for his work. He helped launch tabloid journalism by staying up all night listening to a police band radio in his tiny one room apartment, so he could rush out to be the first to cover a murder. He photographed the scenes with a big 4x5 press camera and flash bulbs in lurid and strange ways designed for newspapers that became his trademark. The aggressive work ethic and self promotion kept food on the table for somebody who came from little but the clothes on his back.
Weegee was a tireless self promoter who became one of the most well known photographers in America in the 40s and 50s.
This is an early American Century history book as well as a photography book. Weegee would be called a street photographer as much as a photojournalist today. Like Brassai he captured the world of NYC in the 20s and 30s at night, much the same people as Brassai photographed in Paris at the same time. The photos invite you to step right into the scenes and compel you to stop and stare...
Usher (Arthur) Fellig was an Ukrainian Jew from the NYC Jewish Ghetto of the early 20th Century, who took the name Weegee for his work. He helped launch tabloid journalism by staying up all night listening to a police band radio in his tiny one room apartment, so he could rush out to be the first to cover a murder. He photographed the scenes with a big 4x5 press camera and flash bulbs in lurid and strange ways designed for newspapers that became his trademark. The aggressive work ethic and self promotion kept food on the table for somebody who came from little but the clothes on his back.
Weegee was a tireless self promoter who became one of the most well known photographers in America in the 40s and 50s.
This is an early American Century history book as well as a photography book. Weegee would be called a street photographer as much as a photojournalist today. Like Brassai he captured the world of NYC in the 20s and 30s at night, much the same people as Brassai photographed in Paris at the same time. The photos invite you to step right into the scenes and compel you to stop and stare...
October 1, 2016
A few fairly short essays about Weegee and his times and lots of Weegee's pictures, mostly from his crime reporter days. I found a lot of the pictures too small to really appreciate.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews