It is thus surprising that the first full-scale biography of Weegee has only just been published. Fortunately, Christoper Bonanos’s Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous was worth the wait.1Profusely illustrated and written in a lively but not showy manner, Flash is comprehensively informed, consistently intelligent, almost entirely devoid of technical jargon, and, unlike many pop-culture biographies, not too long for its substance. It explains with clear-eyed sympathy why “Weegee the Famous,” as he billed himself, had slipped into obscurity by the time of his death in 1968, and why he is increasingly remembered only by historians of photojournalism.
Born in what is now Ukraine in 1899, Weegee was the second son of a family of Yiddish-speaking Galician Jews who emigrated to Manhattan 10 years later, where they shared a rat-infested Lower East Side tenement. He discovered his métier by chance when an itinerant street photographer took his picture in 1913. Fascinated by the results, he bought a tintype kit, and within a year he had landed a job at a commercial photo studio. By 1921 he was a darkroom assistant at the New York Times, and shortly after that he was selling pictures to any newspaper that would print them.
The invention in 1925 of the flashbulb, which made it possible to take unposed photographs at night and indoors, sealed Weegee’s future. By 1934 he had become a full-time freelance news photographer. He set up shop in a squalid studio apartment that doubled as his darkroom, installing a police radio and a fire-department alarm bell and prowling the streets of New York each night in search of scenes of carnage.
As he later explained:
Most of your job is just sitting around waiting for some baby doll to toss a knife into her daddy.… Most fires happen around one or two in the morning. Five o’clock is the jumping time—people are out of liquor and the gin mills are closed. Their resistance is low, and if they’re going to do it, that’s when they do it.
Weegee’s photos, which were syndicated to newspapers throughout the U.S., appeared in those papers a few years after Warner Bros. and other studios began releasing gangster movies such as Little Caesar and Scarface that contained unprecedentedly explicit scenes of mayhem. The black-and-white cinematography of these films was strikingly similar in effect to the news photos taken by Weegee and his colleagues. Whether their cinematographers had been influenced by newspaper photojournalism—or vice versa—cannot be known. What can be said with certainty, though, is that a growing number of Depression-era Americans, whether they knew it or not, increasingly viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s old-fashioned Speed Graphic camera.