Weegee

A sensational photographer with a taste for documenting the underbellies of urban New York City, Weegee had an insatiable visual appetite for the spectacle of life, rendering the events he encountered truthfully through his photographs. His stark, black-and-white photographs of crime scenes, street life and urban chaos brought him fame and established him as one of the most iconic photographers of his era.

Born Usher Fellig in 1899, in Zloczow, Austria-Hungry (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), the photographer adopted the first name ‘Arthur’ when he arrived in the United States at the age of 10. Largely self-taught, Fellig began working as a photographer when he was 14 years old and later employed at a photography studio in lower Manhattan in 1918.

Fellig’s distinctive style emerged from his work as a freelance photographer in Manhattan, where he often worked out of his car, equipped with a police radio. This allowed him to capture raw, unfiltered images of crime scenes, fires and everyday urban life. Fellig gained a reputation for his uncanny ability to seemingly predict events before them happening and manifest on scene with his camera, as if having consulted a Ouija board. It was because this strange intuition to the goings on of New York City that he adopted the moniker ‘Weegee’.

Fellig’s photographs — often taken at night with a large flash — captured a noir-like atmosphere, turning the streets of New York into a dramatic, almost theatrical backdrop. His work featured subjects such as murders, crime scenes and people on the fringes of society, but it also included lighter, humorous moments of city life.

The photographer’s work was published in newspapers such as the New York Post and Daily News, and his seminal 1945 book Naked City became a landmark in photojournalism, offering an unvarnished look at the city’s underworld. In the 1940s, Fellig relocated to Hollywood, where he explored more experimental forms of photography, including photo distortions and portraits of celebrities and political figures, but it was his early work in New York that defined his legacy. Today, his images are part of the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and more.