Weegee 1943: Clandestine Photographs of People At The Movies

In 1943, Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, photographed the audience in the dark of New York cinemas. Equipped with an infrared flash and a special film, his voyeuristic snapshots show us love and thrills in the dark…

ICP:

As a photographer, Weegee is perhaps the truest, most perceptive, most cynical, and yet most blatantly sentimental chronicler of urban life in twentieth­-century New York. While forging his trade as a tabloid press photographer in the 1930s—a role that was then regarded as the catfish of the journalistic profession—Weegee established a perspective on his city and its inhabitants that in many ways remains with us today. His now­-classic pictures show an insider’s view of brutal crimes and accidents, engaging street kids and ethnic vendors, even tenement dwellers casually gazing out at the latest murder while reading the funny papers. Weegee’s intimate voyeurism and shrugging acceptance of life’s hard knocks constitute a unique approach to documentary photography, one divorced from the reformist zeal of the New Deal thirties yet tempered by the economic trauma of the Depression and an immigrant’s experience of hardscrabble survival.

 

 

“I guess all photographers want to be invisible. We want to photograph people as they are, and people are never quite themselves when they know there’s a camera around. About the closest a photographer can come to be invisible is to photograph in the dark, using infrared film and infrared light. This way your subjects can’t see you and they don’t know they’re being photographed because the infrared flash gives off only a very faint flow”

– Weegee

 

 

 

“Blacks, browns, navy blues – you’ll lose them in infrared pictures. If you have a choice, pick a blonde instead of a brunette. (If you are a gentleman, this is supposed to be a natural preference anyway.)”

– Weegee