“People who work in the daytime are suckers.” – Weegee
Somebody once suggested that the most significant influence on Tom Waits was, more than any other artist, the photographer Weegee. You can hear Wait’s hoarfrost growl echoing through every one of his pictures. Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from a letter written by Weegee in Room 551 of the Regina-Palast Hotel in Munich: “Looks like the picture won’t be finished on time. It rains every day and we can’t find 2 midgets, so it looks like I’ll be here at least 2 more weeks.” It’s a Tom Waits lyric, a scene from one of his nighthawk vignettes realised years before he ever grunted into a microphone. Both men shared an eye for the grit and glitter of life lived by those down in the gutter, looking up at the neon beer signs and mistaking them for stars.
Born Usher Fellig in 1899 to a family of Austrian immigrants, Weegee arrived in New York with his family in 1910 when they set up home in the Lower East Side. His parents did shit work to keep their seven children fed, but circumstances were such that ‘Arthur’ as he was now known left school to bring in extra income working as a photographer’s assistant. At the age of eighteen his wanderlust left him homeless, living in missions or sleeping on park benches, bouncing from one low-paid job to another as he sought work in a photographic studio.
By the age of thirty he’d done stints with The New York Times and Acme Newspictures, mainly working as a darkroom technician and printer. Having filled-in as a news photographer he’d gained the confidence to go freelance. Concentrating on the action around 1 Police Plaza, just around the block from his cheap apartment, his work began to be published by all the major news outlets of the day. It was around this time that he began working under the name ‘Weegee’, the original source of which is lost to history but was supposedly inspired by a New York-mashing of the word ‘ouija’ in reference to his arrival at crime scenes alongside the squad cars and ambulances that had first caught the squeal. What few realised was that since 1938 he’d been riding around with a police-band shortwave radio in his car, which allowed him to get to the scene of a crime before the bodies had been scraped up off the sidewalk. The mobile darkroom he maintained in his trunk meant he could get his prints in before the presses closed, ensuring top scoops as he depicted the decadence and mayhem of his times.
In 1941 he had the first major exhibition of his work, entitled ‘Weegee: Murder Is My Business.’ Four years later came the first book of his photography: Naked City, the rights of which were sold to film producers. By 1947 he was married and in Hollywood acting as “consultant” on the film his work had inspired, divorced three years later and by the mid-50’s was back in Manhattan and working on a new project, a series of ‘distorted’ portraits. Kubrick hired him to work on Dr Strangelove and he continued to experiment with techniques through the 50’s and into the 1960’s, as well as completing a few short films of his own, before the diabetes he’d been diagnosed with in 1957 finally slowed his frenetic rate of output. He died at the age of 69 on 26th December 1968.
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