There are “self -taught men”, and then there are self -taught legends: artists who mythologize so completely that they seem to escape the limits of the normal personality. Weegee was one of those artists. “My real name is Arthur Fellig. But I don't even recognize him when I see him,” he said In an interview of 1965. Famous for his beginning of a career as a night press photographer – by turning macabre images of fires, murders and other tragedies in contrast – Weegee would have won his name for his strange capacity to present himself in catastrophe stages before the police, by inciting some to Compare it to a Plank Ouija.
During most of his start of his career, the photographer lived on the precarious margins of the company, still on the move and often in a state of close roaming. (He also worked on odd jobs, especially as a film violinist for silent films.) The first Weegee photographic employer, ACME Newspictures, would not send him during the day unless he was wearing a white shirt and a tie, so he started to go down the streets at night, to steal from a disaster in disaster in a rented ambulance, while he became a fire To three Germans caused him a Bondorus TROISSOR five. Weegee worked hard to cultivate her identity as eccentric. Although he was neither capable nor willing to become an integrated member of the World Art Society of New York, the photographer qualified as “weekend the famous” and easily took the role of an object of curiosity among the elite. Finally, he moved to Hollywood, where he even had a brief passage as a character actor.
Weegee: Society of the showAn exhibition in the career of the work of the photographer now in sight at the International Photography Center, aims to fill the gap between this weekend start and the one who continued to photograph stars and politicians from Hollywood. Critics tended to reject the end of career Weegee, as if his gaze Tawdry had become intolerable once he left the streets and entered the studio. It is perhaps because his career extends over a historic fracture of art in its own right: the start of the Weegee can be justified in the context of documentary photography of the 1930s, in particular the genre as it was redesigned and adopted by the European avant-garde. In this reading, Weegee is the American counterpart of Spacerwhose nocturnal images of Parisian hells were adopted by the surrealists. (Weege's Own Salvador Dali portraitsin sight in a Scoop! Operation of the magazine's photo, underline this parallel.) There is a cultural cachet to this connection, and the anti-establishment street credit of modernism is lost in Hollywood.
But if we look at what happens later, as this exhibition encourages us to, something curious emerges: a feeling of weekend as a proto-pop artist. Faced with a wall of his distorted portraits, we found ourselves face to face with images of icons of pop (and pop art) culture like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. Suddenly, we recover something curiously Warholian in the first photos of Weegee of criminals and murderers: are they not the joyful precursors of Pop Art Paragon's 13 most sought after men (1964) and Death and disasters (1962–67)? By kissing the spectacle of horror through the hyperbolic character, larger than life that Wegee built for himself, does the photographer not occupy a strange environment between the media and his parody? Was Weegee a pop artist? This question would have seemed strange to me six months ago – but after seeing his 1965 portrait “for Senator Andy Warhol”, I wonder.
Weegee: Society of the show Continue to the International Photography Center (84, rue Ludlow, Lower East Side, Manhattan) until May 5. The exhibition was organized by Clément Chéroux.
