News

At the scene of the crime

Foto Colectania presents Weegee the Famous, the photographer who captured the tumultuous times of gangland New York in the 1930s and 40s

Nobody could accuse photographer Arthur Felling (1899-1968) of being presumptuous in choosing his “monica” Weegee the Famous. The name sounds similar to the ouija board used by fortune tellers and he did have the uncanny habit of seemingly talking to the dead, but in his case, victims of gangland slayings in the New York of the 1930s and 40s. Indeed, despite being so well connected to the police, Weegee was often on the scene of the crime before even New York’s finest. And working out of an improvised darkroom in the trunk of his car (tuned in to police radio frequencies), the most well-known crime-scene photographer of all time had his photographs on the editors’ desks of the city’s top newspapers before others had taken the roll of film out of their cameras.

The Polish-born New Yorker always wanted to be famous and he succeeded. His approach to the profession was ground-breaking and set a standard in pictorial journalism before independent studios like Magnum had been conceived.

Thousand upon thousand of those images and negatives are now in the hands of the Swiss collector Michèle Auer and her husband Michel, and they have loaned 500 of them to Barcelona’s Fundació Foto Colectania as part of an exhibition Weegee by Weegee, in conjunction with the Banc Sabadell’s art foundation.

These are photos of the result of bloody feuds between gangs, criminals gunned down by police, innocent victims caught in the crossfire, smirking gangsters being led away to the cells. Anyone who was anyone in the crime world wanted to claim they had been “shot” by Weegee the Famous.

Sign in. Sign in if you are already a verified reader. I want to become verified reader. To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader.
Note: To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader and accept the conditions of use.