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Weegee (American, 1899-1968). Three Die in Fire on East Side, 137-139 Suffolk St, New York, March 4, 1937. Gelatin silve...
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Description
Weegee (American, 1899-1968)Three Die in Fire on East Side, 137-139 Suffolk St, New York, March 4, 1937
Gelatin silver
9-1/2 x 7-5/8 inches (24.1 x 19.4 cm)
3 killed, 20 hurt as 200 residents flee the Old-Law Tenements - criminal negligence was charged.
LITERATURE:
New York Post, March 4, 1937, front cover this photograph reproduced;
New York World-Telegram, March 4, 1937, front cover this photograph reproduced;
New York Herald Tribune, March 5, 1937, p. 40, this photograph reproduced;
The New York Sun, March 4, 1937, p. 2, this photograph reproduced.
Group of Weegee Photographs Unseen for 83 Years
In 1970, David Young walked into a secondhand shop in Philadelphia. "It was this really funky store, with nooks and crannies, and I saw this box," Young said. Through time the photographs had become curled tightly around each other. "I peeled one off and there's police officers hovering over a dead body. I said, 'God, that's weird.' So, I peeled off another and it was a car wreck. I said, 'These are cool. I think I'll buy these for $2.'"
As he moved from place to place over the years the largely unexamined box of photographs followed him. He finally moved to the Seattle area in 1987, put them away for safekeeping, and forgot about them.
A random inspection of his rental apartment a little over a year ago got him to do some organizing. He found a few of the photos in a box in the garage and it reminded him that the rest might be in the kitchen. He reached to the back of a cabinet next to the kitchen sink and there was a box with 52 photographs. A couple of weeks later he found a few more in another box.
He now noticed that many had a stamp that read "Credit Photo to A. Fellig" on the backs. He Googled the name, something that was impossible back in 1970, and immediately saw that Arthur Fellig was the name of the photographer who was later known as Weegee and died in 1968. It is said that Weegee got that nickname because police and fellow photographers thought that the only explanation why the freelancer was often on the scene of the crime first was that he used a Ouija board.
As a newspaper photographer he was only interested in taking a photo of a crime scene, making a print, and selling it to a newspaper for publication the next morning. The prints themselves were almost disposable. He joked he didn't have a filing system. He kept his photographs under the bed or in the trunk of his car. It is very rare for these prints to have survived. Most of the newspapers discarded their prints over the years. How a box Weegee's photographs, almost all from a few months in early 1937, ended up in a junk shop in Philadelphia is a real mystery. These photographs appear to be the only surviving prints of these images.
Many of Weegee's photographs of murders, fires, car crashes and street life of New York are among the most famous in 20th century journalism. After he became famous in later life he printed photographs that ended up in museums and collections around the world. Weegee became the archetype for the cigar-chomping, hard-boiled news photographer portrayed in films like Joe Pesci's "The Public Eye" and Jake Gyllenhaal's "Nightcrawler."
We would like to thank Christopher Bonanos, author of "Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous," for his extensive research on these photographs.
More information about Weegee, also known as Weegee, Fellig, Arthur H., Fellig, Arthur.
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