The New Yorker:

The famed twentieth-century photojournalist Weegee was just as fascinated with tragedy—fires, car crashes, murders—as he was with our desire to gawk.

By Naomi Fry

In “Weegee’s Secrets of Shooting with Photoflash,” a 1953 instruction manual for hobbyists and would-be professionals, the famed photojournalist Arthur Fellig offers this piece of advice: “A news picture is like any other commodity. . . . It can always be sold if it’s good. It is also a perishable commodity . . . so—act fast!” His counsel was based on much personal experience. Fellig was born, in 1899, to Jewish parents in present-day Ukraine. By 1909, the family had immigrated to New York.

Fellig began freelancing for the tabloid press in his thirties. He became so well known for the speed and acuity with which he was able to get a “good” picture, that he quickly took on the name Weegee (a homonym for “Ouija,” it supposedly nodded to his uncanny ability to predict when something worth shooting was about to happen). Weegee’s most successful photographs captured events like fires, car crashes, crime scenes, and their aftermath; the value of the pictures relied on their immediacy and sensationalism. And yet, paradoxically, the intended ephemerality of his images—their glinting, flash-lit air, their propitious formal arrangements—is what has granted them a lasting significance, which has grown only more potent in the twenty-first century.

Go to link