Product Description

An accessible, collectable book on Weegee. First immigration American, Weegee (1899–1968) is the archetypal tabloid photographer of the twentieth century. Preferring to photograph under the cover of night, he was known for his aggressive use of flash. Weegee’s photographic eye was unstoppable: drawn to the grotesque, the illicit, the illegal, Weegee delivered both harrowing and poignant photographs of crime scenes and criminals to New York’s tabloid-reading public in the 1930s and 1940s. Named after the ‘Ouija board’ for his uncanny ability to arrive at the scene of a crime before the police, Weegee recorded the dark side of New York’s streets. No sordid crime seemed to escape his flash and no crime was too gruesome to capture on camera for the papers the next day. Weegee’s understanding of people’s simultaneous repulsion and attraction to vivid photographs of crimes of passion, murder, brutal accidents was well before his time. Even today, his photographs still have the power to shock, and the originality of the images has elevated them in importance far beyond the newspapers he worked for.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #386571 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 78 pages

Review
"Weegee's photographs captured and interpreted what was most vital in the contemporary scene. He confronted great brutality and affirmed our ability to withstand it."--Louis Stettner
-- Review

Review

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Customer Reviews

Mr Crime-and-Disaster
A very reasonably priced introduction to the work of this great photojournalist. Because his work depicts the rawness of New York life and primarily for tabloid papers I always thought the critical establishment regarded Weegee as a sideline contributor to American art photography but this book with fifty-five of his, perhaps best known, photos clearly puts him in the mainstream.

In the mid-forties after he went to Hollywood and basically stopped taking the gritty news photos he's famous for I thought his creativity declined, especially in the early fifties when Weegee played about with photo distortions (fortunately only one of these images is in the book) which seem not much more than an art student playing about.

Author Kerry Purcell writes a short introduction and the photos follow, one to a page with good captions and if you warm to these images check out 'Weegee's New York' (ISBN 3823854712) a sumptuous large size 335 page paperback. The definitive biography is by Miles Barth, 'Weegee's World' (ISBN 0821226495) again a beautifully produced book with more than 250 photos and three essays. These three books are a celebration of a great news photographer who knew what his readers wanted to see.