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Veteran
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=18026
Images from an early voyeur
By robin laurence
Publish Date: 25-May-2006
Weegee’s New York
At the Simon Fraser University Gallery until June 17
Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, created one of the most distinctive photographic styles of the 20th century. Born in 1899 in what is now Ukraine, and based most of his life in New York City, where he died in 1968, he invented an in-your-face way of looking at the urban environment that juxtaposed the everyday delights of the street with crime, disaster, poverty, deprivation, and deviance.
On view at the SFU Gallery are 66 vintage black-and-white photographs and two posters. They range across Weegee’s career, from his acclaimed, tabloid-style photojournalism of the 1930s and ’40s to his less-admired experimental photography of the 1950s and ’60s. The former includes one of Weegee’s most famous images, The Critic, in which two elderly operagoers, draped in furs, jewellery, and disdain, are stared at by a scowling, open-mouthed member of another class. The latter includes kaleidoscopic and sometimes hideously distorted portraits of celebrities, from Charlie Chaplin to Marilyn Monroe. All are on loan from the collection of Weegee’s niece, Ellen Newberg, and her husband, Alan.
Weegee cultivated an eye for aberration and an aesthetic of everyday grotesqueness that hugely influenced a succeeding generation of photographers, most notably Diane Arbus. As gallery director-curator Bill Jeffries points out in the exhibition brochure, the work speaks to a film-noir sensibility, a nocturnal view of the city that encompasses jazz singers, exotic dancers, drag queens, patrons of bars and clubs, and young couples making out in movie theatres.
Weegee’s camera also nails ragged street vendors, tenement dwellers sleeping on fire escapes, and a hobo looking fixedly at a selection of silk ties in the window of a custom tailor. Weegee himself endured a lifetime of poverty, “slept rough” in parks and flophouses in his teens and 20s, Jeffries reports, and was completely at home in the street. As a result, perhaps, he catches hold of some of the city’s happier moments, including Lower East Side children playing in water shooting from a fire hydrant, and smiling, well-dressed crowds celebrating Easter in Harlem.
Still, Weegee is undeniably identified with a tabloid taste for violent crime and fiery disaster. There are shots here of bloody murder victims sprawled on filthy sidewalks, alleged criminals being dragged away by the police, stunned victims of car accidents, raging apartment fires and people fleeing them with babies and clothing bundled in their arms. Among the most dismaying, the most explicit of grief and horror, is Mrs. Henrietta Torres and Daughter Ada Watch as Another Daughter and Her Son Die in Fire. Weegee claimed to have wept while taking this shot. Still, he took it.
For two decades, his camera stared baldly at people in the throes of passion, sorrow, or distress, people numbed by shock or poverty or booze. We could argue that Weegee was developing a forthright address of the human condition, the urban underbelly. But we could also contend that his work appeals to the sensation-seeking voyeur in us. In a recent interview with the Georgia Straight, Jeffries suggested that the spectator is as important an element in Weegee’s photography as the disastrous event. It’s possible that his vision paved the way for that apotheosis of spectacle and voyeurism—contemporary television. A dispiriting thought.