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Weegee, the great tabloid photographer of the 1940s and '50s, took a remarkable picture of Veronica Lake. The legendary movie star and pinup model is shot from behind, so only her fur-coat-covered back and neatly coiffed hair can be seen. The picture's real focus is a group of fans staring at her, their faces unsmiling, and more than a little menacing.
The image is part of "Unknown Weegee," a gripping exhibition at the International Center of Photography. Weegee's classic film-noir style is represented in black-and-white pictures of blanket-draped corpses on sidewalks, and more elegantly chilling fare, like the picture of a fashionable young woman covering her face with black- gloved hands, entitled "Irma Twiss Epstein, Nurse Accused of Killing Baby."
The most intriguing photos, though, are the crowd shots, like "Veronica Lake," that capture people on the street gazing too intently at celebrities, accidents and crime scenes.
Weegee's photography is credited with helping create American tabloid journalism, paving the way for The National Enquirer and TV shows like "America's Most Wanted." But the crowd shots are a reminder that in the process, Weegee also helped turn America into a nation of gawkers.
Arthur Fellig, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, got his big break when he was hired by PM, a left-wing newspaper. He acquired his famous nickname because of his Ouija-boardlike ability to find his way to a good photographic scene. The first photographer to have a police radio in his car, Weegee was almost invariably the first one to show up after a body hit the pavement.
Weegee's brilliance at capturing the seedy underbelly of New York is on full display in "Unknown Weegee." There are perp walks and car crash victims, and a wide array of pictures of untimely death, including one titled "This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother."
Weegee had a gift for highlighting the unexpected, stylish and even humorous aspects of dark scenes. The subject of "Mrs. Anna Sheehan Accused as Murderess," with her fine fur-collared coat and elegant hat, looks as if she is on her way to a swank nightclub. A photo titled "Cop Who Looks Like Gary Cooper Books Blind Man for Murder" is precisely that.
The cover of the exhibition catalog features "Faces in the Crowd," a stark picture of people looking straight ahead, and an essay inside underscores the attention Weegee paid to the "city of eyes, joined together by curiosity." This emphasis is appropriate. Weegee's endlessly curious crowds in photos like "Looking at the Body of Salvatore Sutera, Murder Victim" and "At an East Side Murder" are in many ways as fascinating, and as unsettling, as the sensational scenes they are taking in.
Weegee's photographs allowed hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers, in the privacy of their own homes, to join these mesmerized crowds. His tabloid photos have, since then, been supplanted by cable television and the Internet, which allow Americans to be part of the 24-hour media circuses that endlessly rehash the legal sagas of people like Michael Jackson.
Living as we now do in a tabloid culture, it is hard not to identify with Weegee's ravenously curious onlookers, but it is also hard not to feel a bit wistful, and even worried, about what Weegee has wrought.
In his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," the cultural critic Neil Postman warned that the "age of show business" is not only degrading the culture but also undermining democracy.
While some people worry about America becoming an Orwellian dystopia, the nation as totalitarian prison, the greater threat, Postman argued, is Aldous Huxley's, from "Brave New World," of America becoming a mindless burlesque. No good can come, he cautioned, "when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act."
The most alluring images in "Unknown Weegee," like "Ermine- Wrapped Patron Caught in Gambling Den" or "Virginia Ornmark, Gun Girl," are hard to turn away from. That is their genius, and their peril. Looking at Weegee's shots of transfixed crowds, caught in the spell of the lurid, one cannot help but share their fascination and wonder if it wouldn't have been better if a policeman had shown up to say, "Move along, there is nothing to see here."
Adam Cohen is a member of the New York Times editorial board.
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
