Arthur Fellig was an interesting character, and this biography does a comprehensive job of painting a picture of where he came from and how he rose to fame. ( )

The famous Weegee, the New York freelance news photographer. He had the best timing, as to how his name came to be. (From Ouija) I thought this book was well written, and easy to follow. It showed how his life wasn’t Hollywood all of the time, how being a photojournalist and how the media changed from the 1940’s to the 1960’s but he enjoyed it. A forgotten New Yorker came back to life through Christopher Bonanos’s book! ( )

Interesting, but is it art?

Questions of that sort, often asked about the work of Norman Rockwell, were also asked about that of his contemporary, photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. The question is answered in the affirmative in the excellent biography “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous” by Christopher Bonanos.

Usher Fellig was a 10-year-old Jewish immigrant when he came through Ellis Island in 1909. He soon changed his name to Arthur, but later he called himself Weegee, his spelling of Ouija, because of his apparent clairvoyance in arriving at the scene of murders and fires so soon after they happened. He worked as a freelance news photographer, selling his photos, most of them taken at night with flashbulbs, to whichever of New York’s many newspapers at the time would buy them. He insisted that his name be placed in the credit line, helping to establish his fame, as well doing a favor for generations of newspaper photographers to follow.

Weegee’s photos were stark and stunning, often oddly humorous. He had a knack for including signs in the background as if in commentary on the scene. Some of best photos showed not a murder victim nor a fire but the faces of those looking at the murder victim or the fire. He was not always the most honest of news photographers, as when he placed a manikin among a crowd of onlookers at a fire.

As his fame grew and as he got older, Weegee sought easier ways to make a living. He took assignments for Life and Look magazines, he published collections of his photographs, he spent time in Hollywood trying to get into films (you might spot him in “Every Girl Should Be Married,” among other movies) and took distorted portraits of famous people. He even had a few shows in art galleries, but the art world never really accepted him. He was too coarse, too common, too vulgar.

Only after his death, as with Norman Rockwell, did the artistry in his best work become apparent. ( )

Arthur Fellig a.k.a. “Weegee the Famous” was a freelance photographer who made his inimitable mark during the 1930s and 1940s heyday of New York City newspaper journalism. Christopher Bonanos’s Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous is an excellent biography of Fellig’s life and career, evoking the grittiness of the urban crime beat he covered through the author’s atmospheric “film noir” aesthetic. Organized crime, murders, rapes, car crashes, hit-and-runs, fires, arrests, and other assorted scenes of Gotham’s lurid underbelly - Weegee had a knack for being there at the scene and getting the best shot.

An innovator in the techniques of early flash photography and unabashed self-promoter, he sought ways to get his name into the story and reinforce his stature as the city’s go-to photojournalist. With more experience, Weegee sought pictures the went beyond the standard fare, some attributable to his keen photographer’s eye, and occasionally some the result of some creative repositioning of murder victims or smashed vehicles with the aid of complicit police officers or tow truck operators; and sometimes the fabricated scene is only a very subtle adjustment, such as the fedora of the deceased tilted just so. And his evocative perp shots always seemed to capture the person under the utmost stress. His fire photos focused less on the flames and more on the anguish and human drama of the victims: those displaced by the blaze or those who lost loved ones. Weegee gradually focused less on crime scenes and more on “slice of life” photos and reaction shots - or “watching the watchers” as he put it.

By the 1950’s, after the publication of two books of his photos, both well received by the public and critics alike, his modest celebrity status began to wane. There was an unsuccessful foray to Hollywood, where he failed to make any meaningful inroads into a desired film career. And then an odd devotion of his efforts into distortion photography wherein his subjects’ faces and torsos were comically or bizarrely distorted or multiplied; though these photo-caricatures achieved mild success at first, there was little commercial or lasting artistic value, and the novelty quickly wore off. Weegee’s career puttered along with some odd shoots and movie projects. And his last major contribution comes inadvertently, as the inspiration for Peter Sellers weird high-pitched voice in the classic film Dr. Strangelove is none other than Weegee himself.

The final chapter recounts the handful of posthumous gallery retrospectives that occurred in the years following Weegee’s death in 1969, but Bonanos offers no grandiose appreciation of his contribution. Rather, in a single paragraph, the author fittingly notes that Weegee’s early groundbreaking photographic output, like other things once considered disposable, such as comic books, is in retrospect indeed substantive, powerful, and evocative. Through this insightful bio, Bonanos gives his subject due credit, elevating him from a mere footnote or afterthought to rightful status as a worthy contributor in the history of photojournalism. ( )

I have yet to receive this book but I found an excerpt on the New York Times website. If the rest of the book is anything like the excerpt, I think it would be a good read. The excerpt is about the photo taken at the opera house where two very wealthy ladies are photographed with a disheveled, perhaps homeless woman, or perhaps Weegee staged the whole thing. The style of the excerpt is an easy and quick read and keeps the reader engaged. Weegee sounds like quite a character; his name is supposedly a play on the word Ouija, as in Ouija board because he seemed to know ahead of time when something was going to happen, sometimes beating the cops to the scene. I hope this book arrives eventually--I'd really like to read "the rest of the story"! ( )