Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The first comprehensive biography of Weegee—photographer, “psychic,” ultimate New Yorker—from Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid.
Arthur Fellig’s ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he renamed himself “Weegee,” claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. In Flash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied.
From self-taught immigrant kid to newshound to art-world darling to latter-day caricature—moving from the dangerous streets of New York City to the celebrity culture of Los Angeles and then to Europe for a quixotic late phase of experimental photography and filmmaking—Weegee lived a life just as worthy of documentation as the scenes he captured. With Flash, we have an unprecedented and ultimately moving view of the man now regarded as an innovator and a pioneer, an artist as well as a newsman, whose photographs are among most powerful images of urban existence ever made.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York magazine senior editor Bonanos (Instant: The Story of Polaroid) constructs an energetic and informative biography of photographer Arthur Fellig (1899 1968), better known as Weegee, whose crime scene photos captured the grit and grime of New York City in the 1940s. The book traces Weegee's career from his early years as a "squeegee boy" at the New York Times, where his chief responsibility was drying prints, to his darkroom work at Acme Newspictures, where it is rumored that one of his colleagues gave him the name Weegee, and finally to his rise as the photographer of "crashes, crimes scenes, arrests, and fires." Bonanos details how Weegee created his fame using a combination of talent and relentless self-promotion (he was known to introduce himself as "the world's greatest living photographer"), but the book's most revealing sections are actually about the dramatic waning of his fame toward the end of his career, as he started to take gag pictures for curious business ventures, including a line of greeting cards and posters for dorm rooms. Bonano's revelatory portrait of "Weegee the Famous" will interest general readers, as well as those with a special interest in photojournalism. 65 b&w photos.
