It takes two to Ouija, at least the way I played the spiritualist parlor game growing up. Each person places a hand on the planchette and lets it be their guide. Of course, one hand is actually directing the pointer in the process of divination. The other participates only in so far as it submits to the message.
Spectacle functions in much the same way. There’s no show without an audience and, in a consumerist society, it’s expected to be a passive one.
Enter Weegee, née Usher Fellig, with a cigar smoldering in his mouth and a flashbulb-mounted Speed Graphic camera in his hands at the dawn of what French theorist Guy Debord and his fellow Situationists would later term the “society of the spectacle,” our current epoch, where commodities, in the form of advertising and mass media, cast a shroud over all aspects of lived experience.
The son of Ukrainian immigrants who settled in Brooklyn in 1909 when he was 10, Weegee went from taking souvenir photographs of children atop his pony (according to his autobiography) to working in the darkroom at The New York Times to capturing some of the 20th century’s most iconic images as a freelance photojournalist in the 1930s and ’40s when nine daily newspapers competed for New Yorkers’ attention.
Car wrecks, burning buildings, perp walks, circus performers, slum dwellers and dead gangsters are cast in stark relief through Weegee’s lens. A consummate showman himself, he was dubbed, or more likely dubbed himself, Weegee for his uncanny ability to be the first among the press to arrive at any given crime scene, a feat he accomplished by keeping an obsessive ear to a police radio.
In Weegee: Society of the Spectacle, currently on view at the International Center of Photography, you get plenty of detectives in porkpie hats and trench coats standing over corpses who were murdered in cold blood, but you also get shots of bystanders rubbernecking from fire escapes, rooftops and from behind police barricades to get a better view the carnage. Just as it takes two to Ouija, it takes two to Weegee, and the man was fond of turning his camera on spectators, revealing the audience to itself.
Take for instance, “Their First Murder,” which shows a group of children, some gleefully, some greedily, jostling for a glimpse of a cadaver. A grief-stricken relative of the victim, surrounded by the insatiable runts, weeps in the center of the photograph.
In his classic Naked City — later the basis for a film, followed by a television series — Weegee captioned the photo, “A woman relative cried … but neighborhood dead-end kids enjoyed the show when a small-time racketeer was shot and killed.” On the facing page of the book, an instant success when it was published in 1945, there’s a photo of said racketeer, lying in a gutter in a pool of blood with a DOA (dead on arrival) tag tied to his wrist.
Weegee was also fond of photographing moviegoers enraptured, and occasionally necking, in those dark chambers of dreams that served as America’s principal source of spectacle before the proliferation of television sets. Something Debord wrote in the 1960s comes to mind looking at these photographs:
A consummate showman himself, he was dubbed Weegee for his uncanny ability to be the first among the press to arrive at any given crime scene, a feat he accomplished by keeping an obsessive ear to a police radio.
“When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings — dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch.”
Sight, after all, is the “most abstract and easily deceived sense.”
Weegee himself described operating under a kind of hypnotic state while he was on the job, not truly grasping just what he was witnessing until he developed his photos, which he often did on the fly from a portable darkroom installed in the trunk of his ’38 Chevrolet. You’ll get a glimpse of the man, a prodigious self-mythologizer, at work at this mobile set up at the ICP exhibition, along with a self-portrait of Weegee with his Speed Graphic and ubiquitous cigar. There’s also one with him on a cot in the almost monastic chambers he lived in near One Police Plaza where he could be close to the action.
For all his legendary intuition, the photograph Weegee considered his personal favorite is one he staged. The 1943 image features an aged Bowery performer whom he invited to join him at the Metropolitan Opera and identified in the title as the “Critic,” greeting, mouth agape, a pair of fur-clad, bejeweled women as they arrive at opening night. High and low society meet and the results are spectacularly absurd.
The photographer treated America’s class schisms in the same high-contrast light with which he depicted sex and violence. At the ICP showing, we see an old ragman pulling his rented mare through the snow. In Weegee’s frontal portrait, it is as if viewers have startled him in the dead of night. And we see children amid a heatwave sleeping on the fire escapes of the Lower East Side, the neighborhood where Weegee took many of his most iconic images and where this current exhibition takes place.
Weegee’s oeuvre is often divided into two categories: his Gotham years and the time he spent later in life in Hollywood, where he produced numerous parody photographs of celebrities (“spectacular representations of living human beings,” in the words of Debord), using trick lenses that he invented himself. The exhibition seeks to do away with this distinction between the two Weegees, with the throughline being Weegee’s obsession with spectacle.
At first, these later photographs appear as mere caricature work, like something the illustrator Al Hirschfeld might have produced, or worse, something you might pay a guy ten bucks to draw for you on the Coney Island boardwalk. But on further consideration, Weegee’s renderings of figures revered for their beauty, glamour and statesmanship into grotesque distortions of themselves is some of his most subversive work, as it undermines the godly pedestal upon which the celebrity is elevated.
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle arrives at a moment when a vaunted product of the New York tabloids has gotten himself elected president for a second time via a meme-obsessed MAGA movement that measures truth by its convenience to their cause. If only Weegee were around today to document the monstrous madness of it all.
• • •
Weegee: Society of the Spectacle
Through May 5
International Center of Photography
