Saturday, October 5, 2024, 18:43
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While guns were still smoking at the crime scene, Weegee was already there. The legendary photographer was ahead of the police, ensuring the scoop and the front page of the newspapers with the corpses and their trails of blood still hot. But in addition to showing the violence and misery on the streets of New York without filters, Weegee had another side. He showed the least pretty face of Hollywood, as seen in ‘Autopsy of the spectacle’, the exhibition hosted by the Mapfre Foundation until January 5 and which reveals the lesser-known face of this Janus of photography.
Real name User Fellig (Zólochiv, Ukraine 1899-New York, 1968), registered in immigration as Arthur H. Fellig and consecrated as Weegee, his peculiar pseudonym is a phonetic interpretation of the word ‘ouija’, the esoteric güija. Not in vain did he describe himself as a ‘medium photographer’ with ‘a third eye’ and was almost ubiquitous, like spirits. He proclaimed himself ‘the best photographer in the world’ and entered the memory of several generations with his gruesome images.
The exhibition confronts his work as a notary of the misdeeds of the underworld, the events and the marginality of the New York night in the 1930s and 1940s, with the unusual and little-known work that he did in Hollywood between 1948 and 1951. In the Dreams satirized the rich, famous and film celebrities with his ‘photocaricatures’ without achieving the popularity and recognition of his New York images.
‘Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Weeber cover their faces with their top hats’ New York. 1942.
Louis Stettner Archives
Criticism emphasizes the radical opposition between one period and the other, praising the first and disdaining the second. But the exhibition wants to show “the profound coherence” between both stages beyond their stylistic and thematic differences,
Weeggee emigrated in 1909 with his Jewish family to New York, where he encountered the rawest and starkest version of the American dream. He was a developing assistant at the ACME News Pictures agency before becoming a photojournalist. Between 1935 and 1945 he toured the New York night portraying murders, police raids, traffic accidents, fires and gruesome events. Some images that the tabloids disputed.
He was capable of overtaking police officers, firefighters and even the FBI. He tuned into the police frequency on his Chevrolet’s radio. In his trunk he set up a mobile office with a dark room and typewriter. Confident of his unique talent, on the back of his copies he stamped the seal: “Weegee the Famous.”
‘Man arrested for transvestism’. New York. 1939.
Louis Stettner Archives
Political correctness would prevent the publication of their photos today, with riddled corpses lying in pools of blood, children crammed and half-naked on a mattress or transvestites coming out of a police van on the way to the cell.
Manipulated
True to reality, he did ‘manufacture’ one of his best-known images. ‘The Critic’, present in the exhibition, is a premeditated scene taken on November 22, 1943 at a premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House. For Weegee it was his masterpiece, even though it is a montage in which two high society ladies, wearing furs and bejeweled, appear alongside a beggar woman that Weegee looked for in the slums.
‘Citicism. New York November 22, 1943’.
Friedsam Collection
“He wanted to confront the social classes in New York to show the abyss that separated them,” explains Clément Chéroux, director of the Cartier-Bresson Foundation and curator of the exhibition. “Weegee remains before the real: sometimes he records it and other times he makes small adjustments of reality. Organize a scene and build an image. He doesn’t do it to lie, because his images don’t lie even when there is staging,” says Chéroux.
‘Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of having murdered a police officer0. New York. 1941.
Louis Stettner Archives
Fed up with the night and the blood, he changed New York for Hollywood. When his work had been exhibited at MoMA, he moved from event photos to ‘photocaricatures’. With what he called an ‘elastic lens’ he deforms the rich and famous and mocks Hollywood’s ‘star system’, its ephemeral glories and its sycophants. His acid irony emerges in the laboratory. From his enlarger came the least flattering portrait of the hundreds of thousands made of Marilyn Monroe. And no less bizarre visions of Charles Chaplin that are reminiscent of the distorting mirrors in Cat Alley that inspired Valle Inclán’s grotesquerie. Weegee himself takes distorted self-portraits and deforms icons such as John F. Kennedy, Salvador Dalí, Groucho Marx, Mao, Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor.
Three of Weege’s acidic ‘photocaricatures’ starring Marilyn Monroe, John Fitzgelad Kennedy and Charles Chapil
“This part of his work is much less known, although it was very present in the press of the time but not in museums, like his images of events,” explains Chéroux. «Such a gap is something unusual in the history of photography. They are two sides of the same coin: In Hollywood there is an acidic, fierce, incisive criticism of the society of spectacle and in his black images of the underworld of the Big Apple, Weegee turns the event into a spectacle,” he concludes.
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