Weegee, autopsie du spectacle

208 pages
Edited by  Clément Chéroux
Text(s) by Cynthia Young, Isabelle Bonnet and David Campany
Photograph(s) by Weegee
20.6 x 26.5 cm
Language: French
Hardback
Publisher: Textuel
2024

“Crime is my business.”

There's a Weegee enigma. His photographs fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there are his images of news stories taken in New York in the 1940s, with a direct, raw, documentary approach. On the other, his photographs of starlets, politicians and other socialites in Hollywood in the following decade, for which he readily resorted to trickery.

A self-proclaimed “murder mystery”, Weegee stood out for his ability to arrive promptly at crime scenes, or to wait for salad baskets to arrive on police station stoops to capture defendants on the spot. Nevertheless, he made a point of including onlookers, often from the working classes, in his frame, and even of focusing solely on them.

Comprising some one hundred photographs - the best-known, but also many never before shown - this book demonstrates the coherence of Weegee's work, based on a radical and incisive critique of the Société du Spectacle, imbued with an unexpected empathy for the underprivileged.