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There are people who don't mind their jobs. There are people who are happy to stay an extra hour to finish some work. There are people who get up every day with the reassuring knowledge they're doing exactly what they were meant to.
And then there was Weegee — a.k.a. Austrian immigrant Arthur Fellig — who came to the U.S. in 1910 when he was about 10 years old.
Weegee lived and breathed tabloid photography during his heydays in New York from the 1920s to the 1940s. Looking at his pictures, it's easy to think there was developer in his blood, fixer in his brains, flashbulbs in his eyes and a layer of emulsion in his skin.
More than 200 of Weegee's photos are coming to the Cincinnati Art Museum July 14-Sept. 15 for Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama. The show covers his life's work, from early freelancing for Acme Newspictures in 1924-35 to his tenure at the newspaper PM, among others, in 1936-46 to his later experiments in abstract photography and short films in Los Angeles.
Some say Weegee's nickname was derived from "Ouija" because of his ability to get to fires, murders, car crashes and other news events first. That probably had less to do with paranormal ability, however, than with Weegee being the first photographer to have a police radio in his car.
Having a darkroom in his trunk didn't hurt, either.
It all led many New York newspapers to buy his photos even though they had staff photographers. His relentless pursuit of news pictures sometimes brought him more than $100 a week during the Great Depression — a time when one-third of the country was unemployed.
Weegee's gritty, stark shots are as anti-Ansel Adams as you can get. His regular all-night shift led him to Harlem clubs, gang murders and many, many fires. During the daytime he shot the teeming masses at Coney Island, for starters.
His photos didn't conceal his compassion for the lower classes living in the Bowery and other Lower East Side neighborhoods, nor his contempt for the upper classes of New York. In "The Critic," perhaps his most famous photo, both run into each other as a Bowery wino snarls at jeweled opera patrons leaving a performance.
Weegee's primary concern in life was to get the picture, even if that meant setting it up a little. For "The Critic," he reportedly grabbed a drunk from a bar, drug him outside the opera and waited for the awkward moment to develop. Questions of authenticity dog the rest of his photos, from his picture of a group of kids sleeping on a fire escape during a heat wave to his close-up shot of a woman's shoe under a car tire just after an accident. What was untouched?
But there's no questioning Weegee's stamina, adventurousness and technical skill. Decades before autofocus, autoexposure and autoflash took the math and a lot of the guesswork out of photography, Weegee popped picture after nighttime picture with his huge, manual-everything Graphlex Speed Graphic camera.
There's even a tenuous Weegee/ Cincinnati connection: Parts of the 1993 movie The Public Eye — starring Joe Pesci and loosely based on Weegee's life — were filmed in Over-the-Rhine.
Weegee's World: Life, Death and the Human Drama runs July 14-Sept. 15 at the Cincinnati Art Museum in Eden Park.
