PHOTOGRAPHS
Weegee [Arthur Fellig]
Austria-Hungary / U.S. (1899 - 1968)
Drink Coca-Cola
c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
13 7/16 x 10 1/2 in. (34.2 x 26.7 cm) image size; 13 15/16 x 11 in. (35.4 x 27.9 cm) sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection
FA 2006.66

Born Usher Fellig in Zloczow, Austria (now Poland), Weegee resettled with his family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910. He quit school at the age of 14 and worked as a commercial photographic assistant until he took a job as a darkroom technician with Acme Newspictures (later United Press International Photographs) in 1924. Only in 1935 did Weegee leave to pursue a career as a freelance photojournalist, specializing in the darker side of the police beat; crimes of passions, celebrity scandals, suicides, and Mafia hits were his stock-in-trade. By carefully monitoring police radios from his car, he was frequently the first person on the scene of a crime or disaster--thus, his nickname "Weegee," a phonetic spelling of "Ouija" of Ouija Board fame. Weegee's trademark is an unflinching frontal picture captured in the stark light of a large flash; the resulting aesthetic remarkably appropriate given the fact that he was often casting light on a sinister, perverse, violent, and macabre world unfamiliar to his audience. Between 1935 and 1947, when he turned to advertising, Weegee was the best-known tabloid photographer in the U.S. His work and career, documented in his book Naked City, became the basis for one of the first television tabloid news programs. --Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: A Critical History of Photography, The Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection, Cincinnati Art Museum, October 12, 2001 to January 6, 2002.