Customer Reviews

Unknown Weegee

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A fine book of Weegee photos though the title is somewhat misleading. The International Center of Photography has over eighteen thousand of his photos so there could easily be dozens of books with exactly the same title. Of the 111 photos in the book probably less than half were actually published and they were certainly not printed with a 175 screen on glossy paper as they are here.

The photo selection is excellent and a typical cross-section of Weegee's output, down and outs sleeping in doorways, fire and crime scenes, cops and suspects, strippers, animals, the weather, celebrities (fortunately not too many) and plenty of photos of folks just looking at some street drama. Some of these photos will really grab you, for instance, page fifty-four shows the inside of a movie house in Washington DC, with a wooden partition, seat high, running from the back to the front to segregate the white and colored audience. There surely can't be many photos that record this. The front of the book has four essays, two are contemporary and the others historical, Paul Strand's is from 1945 and Ralph Steiner wrote his in 1941. Both are interesting because to them Weegee is basically a news photographer but each recognised the creative potential in his work back then.

My only criticism is the rather sloppy editorial format. The list at the back of the book gives technical details about the 111 photos but they are not printed in the same sequence as this list so the reader has to scan through it to find out a bit of information for a particular photo. Art book publishers really should try harder.

This is a worthy addition to the books in print about Weegee, if you are new to his work check out the inexpensive 'Weegee' (ISBN 0714842249) by Kerry Purcell with fifty-five of his best photos and nicely each one has a detailed caption about the image, or try 'Weegee's New York: Photographs 1935-1960' (ISBN 3823854712) a large, beautifully printed paperback with 335 super photos.