Weegee: The Society of the Spectacle is a new book about Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig – the Ukraine-born photographer famous (or infamous) for his gritty images of New York’s street life from the 1940s to the 1960s – accompanying an exhibition on display at the International Centre of Photography (ICP) in New York until May 5, as Veronica Esposito reports for The Guardian.
“Known both for his preternatural ability to show up at the scene of murders, car crashes, fires and other urban calamities, as well as his bizarre distortions of world-famous figures such as Marilyn Monroe and The Beatles, the photographer Weegee, AKA Arthur Fellig, was a fascinating study in contrasts … The mixture of seediness, spectacle and in-your-face audacity very much captures the public image that Weegee promulgated, as well as the dramatic aesthetic that he cultivated with his photographs … As much as Weegee became synonymous with on-the-scene photojournalism, his career took a sharp turn when he began to make incredibly distorted, grotesque images of luminaries including John F Kennedy and Andy Warhol, and even shots of the Mona Lisa.
‘This is very rare in the story of photography of the 20th century,’ said curator Clément Chéroux. ‘I don’t know of any other photographer who had that same polarity – being both interested in what was right in front of the camera, and then also so interested in the darkroom manipulations. That was what struck me from the beginning … Weegee had a kind of understanding that the tabloid press of the time was transforming everything into a kind of spectacle’ … With our own modern-day fixation on social media images and the endlessness of round-the-clock news, Weegee very much speaks to what the society of the spectacle has become in our time.”
One of Weegee’s photo manipulations, introducing a chapter on Hollywood, is based on his best-known shot of Marilyn arriving at Idlewild Airport (now JFK Airport) on September 9, 1954. The original image – used on a book cover in 1979 – embodies the trope of a glamorous star blowing kisses to her adoring public.
During the same trip, Weegee was one of many photographers who snapped Marilyn standing over a subway grate in a scene from The Seven Year Itch.
A photo from Weegee’s first collaboration with Marilyn – who posed for him at Jones Beach Pool on Long Island in 1949 – was the most popular item among the Monroe-related lots in a Heritage Auctions photo sale in November 2024, fetching $3,250.
Weegee photographed Marilyn at several public events after she moved to New York in 1955. Another caricature, based on a photo taken at the East of Eden premiere in March, was seen in the 2016 exhibition, Marilyn: Character Not Image, in Jersey City.
A rather awkward Weegee photo of Marilyn climbing onto a pink elephant (during a 1955 charity circus at Madison Square Garden) was featured in the 2019 exhibition, New York Stories.
And finally, Weegee’s distortions are thought to have influenced the paparazzi scenes from Andrew Dominik’s controversial Blonde (2022.)
The Marilyn Report 