"Good Stories" from the Mean Streets: Weegee and Hard-Boiled

Autobiography

V. Penelope Pelizzon, Nancy Martha West

The Yale Journal of Criticism, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2004, pp. 20-50
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/yale.2004.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/54774

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Figure . Weegee with his Speed Graphic camera, ca. . Gelatin silver print. Unidentified
photographer. Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

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V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M.West

“Good Stories” from the Mean Streets:

Weegee and Hard-Boiled Autobiography

By the early s, the infamous crime scene photographer Arthur

Fellig—better known by his adopted name “Weegee”—was firmly es-
tablished as an American icon. While his photos of gangland murders
splashed across New York tabloids, Weegee’s own face appeared regu-
larly in the press. His career provides a rare instance in the history of
news photography in which the figure behind the camera achieved as
much notoriety as the pictures he shot. Indeed, his persona often
overshadowed his individual images, and if we step around the corpus
of scholarship valorizing him as a naive psychic-savant with a Speed
Graphic, we find that Weegee’s success depended in large part upon
his calculated deployment of a hard-boiled autobiographical narrative.
Skillfully exploiting a wealth of visual and written media, he utilized
every opportunity to publicize a dynamic life story that capitalized
upon the era’s fascination with hard-boiled tropes. An examination of
his career affords a stunning view of how the wisecracking masculine
discourse popular in the two decades before the second world war
formed a nexus between entertainment genres, such as pulp novels
and Hollywood crime film, and the informational media of American
newspapers.
To a twenty-first century viewer familiar with hard-boiled literature
and its cinematic siblings, the personal look Weegee sported now
seems comically over-determined. In publicity shots, he affects the un-
shaven nonchalance of film noir’s homelier men—Peter Lorre, Ed-
mund O’Brien, or Edward G. Robinson (see Figure ). Like Robin-
son’s chubby gangsters, Weegee punctuates his tough guy persona
with a cigar. His fingernails are dirty, a sign that he, unlike the impec-
cably groomed gangsters he often photographed, makes an “honest”
living. His hand is unburdened by a wedding ring. Straight ahead he
stares, his own Speed Graphic set with a flash attachment ready to fire,
as if he were engaged in a representational shoot-out with the pho-
tographer taking his picture. Below the photograph, a caption reads
“Weegee and his Love—his Camera.” Penned by Weegee himself for
the frontispiece to his first book, Naked City (), the caption an-
chors the meaning already intimated by the photograph—that this

The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume , number  (): 20–50

©  by Yale University and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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man, similar to the pulp fiction detective, lives for his work and finds
erotic pleasure in the violence circumscribing his job.
In fact, Weegee’s career bears important chronological parallels to the
histories of crime fiction and film. His vocational entry was simultane-
ous with the birth of hard-boiled literature. In , just four years be-
fore he took a job as darkroom operator for Acme News Services, H.L.
Mencken and George Jean Nathan founded The Black Mask. The first
pulp magazine to specialize in crime and detective fiction, it introduced
its premier literary detective, Race Williams, in . Created by
writer Carroll John Daly,Williams engendered a line of dry-humored,
steel-fisted detectives who, like the persona Weegee projected, are typ-
ified by flagrant violations of social and professional conventions.
During the heyday of the gangster film genre in the early to mid-
s, Weegee left his job at Acme to become a freelance photographer
specializing in night-shift coverage of fires, accidents and murders. In
, the year that witnessed the release of Billy Wilder’s quintessential
film noir, Double Indemnity, Weegee’s crime scene photographs were on
exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. Finally, by , while the
excesses and uncertainties of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil signaled the
end of a certain type of Hollywood representation of crime, Weegee’s
photographic work had degenerated into optical trickery and soft
pornography. Having relocated from New York to Hollywood, he
drifted into a slow oblivion from which he never recovered.
As we will discuss in Part One of this essay, Weegee was not alone
among newsworkers in playing up the parallels between his life and
that of the hard-hitting heroes in pulp fiction and crime film. During
the same period, a whole cadre of lesser-known press photographers
also began generating autobiographical narratives about their danger-
ous exploits working to acquire news images. Because tabloid work in
particular was so denigrated, it behooved photographers to develop a
thick skin about their experiences in the industry. Like Weegee, many
of these men shaped the professional disadvantages they faced into
narratives that reframed their hardships as hard-boiled adventures.
Meanwhile, the popular media was liberally borrowing from the
tabloid press, at times recasting actual tabloid news stories in fiction
and film, at other points offering dramatic heroes associated with news
work. The result of this interchange was a dynamic symbiosis between
informational and entertainment media.
Part Two extends these broader observations about press work and
hard-boiled tropes to reconsider Weegee in a new light—as an auto-
biographer. In his essay “Weegee’s World,” Miles Barth remarks that
Weegee’s photographs function as “part of an autobiographical proj-
ect.”1 Barth’s comment implies this “project” encompasses more than
the photos themselves, and indeed, a key trait distinguishing Weegee
from other pen-wielding news photographers of his era is the sheer

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scope of his autobiographical venture. While his late prose memoir

Weegee by Weegee () is rightfully given less critical attention than his
earlier work, its main shortcoming is its haphazard regurgitation of au-
tobiographical material he had already circulated decades earlier in
more compelling ways and through an astonishing array of forms, in-
cluding interviews, articles for camera magazines, commissioned pub-
licity photos, and the superb Naked City. Our reading of Naked City ar-
gues that this seminal collection in the photojournalism canon must be
reconsidered as both a consciously crafted narrative, and as autobiography.
Finally, our essay concludes with a brief third section, “Voiceover.”
Borrowing its title from the film trope whereby events are narrated in
retrospect as if, all along, they have been fated to occur, we consider
the implications of America’s fin-de-siècle love affair with film noir
which, as James Naremore has thoroughly demonstrated, extends well
beyond cinematic perimeters to include fashion, music, and advertis-
ing. Using Weegee as a case in point, we posit that the current vogue
for noir imagery is a middlebrow mode of both legitimizing a fasci-
nation with crime while simultaneously distancing that interest from
the tabloid media, which over the past two decades has assumed new
prominence through the proliferation of TV tabloids. Because they
market sensationalized crimes and other social taboos to a working
class and largely female audience, the tabloids have been derided by
the educated elite throughout the twentieth-century. It is only re-
cently that they have begun to be appropriated as a subject “worthy”
of scholarly attention. And while insightful critical studies of the
tabloids have been written, most notably by Kevin Glynn and Eliza-
beth Bird, the overwhelming perception of this media remains as neg-
ative as it did in the s, when Silas Bent in The Nation referred to
it as “the prankish and irresponsible illegitimate child of journalism.”2
By ignoring crime films’ allegiance with the tabloid and locating film
noir’s influences elsewhere in culturally respectable sources such as
German Expressionism, Freudian psychology, and Cold War anxieties,
critics have overlooked the tabloids’ significant impact on crime
cinema. Our essay seeks to redress that gap, identifying the current
“noiressence” in American culture as a class-conscious way of enjoy-
ing the visions of crime now canonized by museums and academia.
At the same time, this noir fetish disassociates those images from the
decidedly lowbrow contemporary tabloids bursting from grocery
checkout isles and dominating the television screen.

I:Tabloid Tough Guys

Film critic Frank Krutnik has observed that the popularity of the
hard-boiled mode “involved not merely an Americanization of the
classical crime or detective story, but also an emphatic process of mas-

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culinisation.”3 This insistence on gendering crime became apparent

not only in fiction and film of the late s through the s, but
also in the seemingly more removed realms of the news industry. As a
matter of fact, one of the most famous journalism exploits of the era
exemplifies how tough guy activities had become part of the day’s
news work. Eager to get a picture of the  execution of murderess
Ruth Snyder in the Sing Sing death chamber where cameras were
banned, the New York Daily News—the reigning tabloid of its age—
brought in Chicago photographer Tom Howard. Howard entered the
prison with the rest of the press corps, a small hidden camera strapped
to his ankle. When the executioner pulled the electric switch, Howard
extended his leg, pressed a shutter threaded through his trousers on a
long cord, and snapped his shot. Assisted by a team of reporters, he
rushed the graphic photo of Snyder’s death-throes back to the paper,
where it ran the next morning under the caption “Dead!”4
The Snyder photograph set off a furor over decency in the press,
and remained notorious in large part because of the illicit way it was
obtained. It also triggered a roughly twenty-five-year period during
which public focus on press photography shifted from images to
something else that assumed surprising importance: the photogra-
pher’s words. For the first time, elaborate narratives were generated
about the act of acquiring news pictures, and American audiences
were encouraged to be as interested in the sensational story behind
the photo as in the image itself. Instead of paying attention to the doc-
umentary powers or aesthetic merits of particular pictures, these nar-
ratives were far more concerned with proving that the shot might
have cost the photographer his life.
By our estimate, well over one hundred hard-boiled accounts of
news photographers’ careers, in the form of book-length autobiogra-
phies, feature articles, newspaper columns, and photo-essays, appeared
between  and approximately .5 Crossing the purlieus of pho-
tography into authorship, Weegee and his contemporaries crafted sto-
ries of ultra-virile prowess that might have emerged right out of crime
fiction and film. This deployment of tough guy style became an effi-
cacious means of legitimizing the male news photographer’s activities,
image, and profession. On a larger scale, these photographers’ narra-
tives attempted to transform the field of photography itself into an
ideal site for the enactment of a variety of masculine postures. They
thus participated in a general twentieth-century trend to sever pho-
tography from its Victorian associations with idleness, social and artis-
tic marginalization, and effeminacy.6
Given that much criticism about Weegee tends to accentuate his
supposedly “maverick” and “naive” style of photography, it is easy to
forget that he spent nearly a quarter of a century in New York City
as a news professional working for press agencies, tabloid newspapers,

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and magazines. He began his career as a part-time darkroom assistant

for the New York Times in , where he dried prints for the paper
and their syndication service Wide World Photos. Later that decade,
he landed a job as a full-time darkroom operator for the Acme news
agency, a source of photographs for three of the major New York
dailies, the Daily News, the World Telegram, and the Herald Tribune.7 He
worked at Acme for roughly ten years, often substituting during his
last five years there for staff photographers who refused to work late-
night shifts covering murders and other crimes. Though he embarked
on a career in freelance photography in , he continued to take
crime photographs for the daily newspapers and, in , was hired as
a special contributing photographer for PM Daily, a progressive news-
paper where he was employed until the paper’s closing in .
We bring up these stages in Weegee’s employment in order to stress
that this “forceful photographer with a unique style and personality”
was squarely situated within the highly visible and gendered sphere of
New York news culture, which taught him not only how to pho-
tograph, but how to define, describe, and promote himself through
storytelling.8 His news work coincided with a period of great energy
and development in the business. Both straight newspapers and
tabloids enjoyed enormous circulation; at the same time, journalism it-
self was being molded by other media, particularly Hollywood film.
Indeed, between  and , the year Weegee himself relocated to
Hollywood, nearly nine hundred films were produced about the news
industry.9 In part, Hollywood’s fascination with newspaper operation
had to do with the steady stream of ex-journalists—including such
well-known figures as Ben Hecht and Mark Hellinger—who mi-
grated to Hollywood as screenplay writers. Moreover, the notoriety of
news photographers like Tom Howard placed the profession in the
public eye. Perhaps most importantly, films focused on the news in-
dustry because it offered a direct link to criminal behavior, thus satis-
fying Hollywood’s exhaustive efforts in the s to exploit its lead-
ing moneymaker, the gangster film, by extending its reach into new
narratives. As critic Thomas Doherty observes, the urban desperado-
hero was a top-seller, and “adroit screenwriters wedge[d] gangsters
into newspaper films, courtroom dramas, and women’s melodrama.”10
As the wealth of news-oriented films from that decade demonstrates,
the reporter’s beat could be as effective as the cop’s for framing crime
stories.
Many films produced about the news business during these years
spotlight the activities of the press photographer on assignment. In
them, the very characteristics for which he was generally derided and
the limitations he faced as a professional are romanticized. As media
historians like Barbie Zelizer have demonstrated, the news photogra-
pher of the s faced a host of liabilities: he generally received scant

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pay (even less than his underpaid fellow reporters), was given little or
no formal training, and was the frequent object of professional and
public antagonism. Reporters generally regarded journalism’s increas-
ing dependence on photographs with ambivalence, recognizing that
images enhanced news appeal while at the same time fearing they had
the potential to circumvent the power of the word. Consequently,
photojournalists of the s often had to work in embattled envi-
ronments. Subject to prejudice within the newsroom, they often fared
worse while on assignment, their cameras still associated with the ex-
ploitations of yellow journalism rampant in the first two decades of
the twentieth century. If these hardships were true for news photog-
raphers in general, they were especially so for the crime news pho-
tographer who, as David J. Krajicek so colorfully puts it, has always
been regarded as “the catfish of the newsroom.”11 Indeed, as a crime
photographer, Weegee was part of a group of news workers with a
reputation for being the “roughest” subculture within the industry. An
occupation that required being on call twenty-four hours a day and
frequenting places like bars and whorehouses, crime photography had
a reputation for appealing only to those men who couldn’t find em-
ployment in other areas of news work.12
To make matters even more difficult for Weegee and others in his
field, crime photography was integrally associated with the tabloid in-
dustry. During the s and s, most crime photographers
worked for tabloid newspapers, which, unlike their “serious” counter-
parts, featured numerous graphic pictures as part of their daily fare.
These papers attracted widespread censure, particularly from religious
groups and the canons of journalistic officialdom. Samuel Taylor
Moore of the Independent described tabloids as “an unholy blot on the
fourth estate—bawdy, inane, and contemptible.”13 Another writer
published a list of “Tabloid Offenses” in the Forum.14 In short, the gen-
eral consensus was that the tabloids “reduce the highest ideals of the
newspaper to the process of fastening a camera lens to every boudoir
keyhole.”15
Tabloids came under such derision partly because they appealed to
the working classes. By the year of the Snyder murder, the three
tabloids that had most closely covered the case—the New York Daily
News, the Daily Mirror, and the Evening Graphic—each boasted a cir-
culation rate surpassing that of most official newspapers. This is par-
ticularly remarkable given that all three had only been founded a few
years earlier. The Daily News appeared in . By , its circulation
rate had neared ,, readers, the largest of any newspaper in the
nation. The Daily Mirror reached a circulation of , by that same
year, due in part to its inside coverage of the famous Hall-Mills mur-
der case in the summer of  and to the hiring of notorious gossip

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columnist Walter Winchell in . Widely regarded as the most dis-

reputable of the three papers, The Evening Graphic (known to its crit-
ics as the “Porno-Graphic”) attracted , readers at the height of
its popularity in . “None of the other New York papers had lost
circulation,” explains historian Simon Bessie, “yet, in less than seven
years three tabloids had acquired ,, readers, apparently con-
juring them up out of the blue.”16 Tabloids thus created an entirely
new set of readers, listed by one writer in  as “shop-girls, stenog-
raphers, housewives, lower theatrical folk, laborers, immigrants, and—
what is most serious—school children,” who apparently had never
read newspapers before.17 It is this popularity with the lower classes,
as much as its interest in crime and other social transgressions, which
has led to the tabloid’s reputation as a déclassé and “trashy” medium,
argues scholar Kevin Glynn.18 It wasn’t simply that the Snyder photo
or crime scene imagery offended the aesthetic or ideological sensibil-
ities of elite readers; crime photography was strongly associated with
the working classes, who were then, as they are now, the tabloids’ most
avid readers.
Yet as a number of films of the period demonstrate, this association
between the tabloid crime photographer and the working classes
could be used to promote the photographer as a hard-boiled hero,
someone rugged and unpretentious enough to be the intermediary
between “ordinary” readers and the news. A stunning example appears
in The Picture Snatcher. The third film from  to cast James Cagney
as a violent, ruthless, and immoral character, The Picture Snatcher sug-
gests that these three traits are essential not only for mobsters but also
for news photographers. Cagney plays Danny Kean, an ex-racketeer
trying to make good. He stumbles into a tabloid office—the one place
where a lack of proper education, a working-class background, and even
a criminal history actually prove advantageous. Immediately hired as a
“picture snatcher,” Kean’s job is to secure photographs of victims by
whatever means necessary, whether it involves posing as an insurance
agent or stealing pictures when a grieving widower has left the room.19
Kean’s willingness to work for the paper implies his continued alle-
giance with criminality, despite his ostensible efforts to reform. And
in direct allusion to Tom Howard’s snapping the Ruth Snyder photo-
graph, Kean sneaks into an execution and takes pictures for his paper.
The Picture Snatcher demonstrated how appealing the press photog-
rapher could be if he was presented as brutal, nefarious, and thus,
hyper-masculine. Other representations in a variety of media followed
over the next decade. In , Black Mask published “Murder Mix-
up,” by George Harmon Coxe. Featuring news photographer Jack
“Flash” Casey, the story valorizes both Casey’s ability to get photos on
his own terms and his refusal to be bossed around on the job. When

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asked by his editor where he and his assistant have been, for example,
Casey responds:“We get paid to take pictures, and we take ’em. How
we get ’em is our business.”20 Casey went through a number of incar-
nations, appearing in the  film Here’s Flash Casey, then later in
Casey, Crime Photographer, a popular radio program that aired nation-
wide in . Meanwhile, Coxe went on to publish novels about an-
other crime photographer, Kent Murdock. An employee of the Boston
Courier-Herald, Murdock moonlights as detective. A stereotypical
tough guy hero, he possesses a “lean hardness of body” and a “solid,
angular jaw.” And although “well mannered, intelligent and well edu-
cated, he could talk the language of cops and bookies and gamblers
and circulation hustlers as though he understood them.”21 Special in-
terest hobby magazines such as Minicam Photography, U.S. Camera, and
Photography also cashed in on the appeal of the punch-throwing pic-
ture man. One article, entitled “The Hard Boiled School of Photog-
raphy,” narrates the “legend of Skippy Adelman, PM’s Picture Ace.”
Described as having a “tough wiry figure” and the “hands of a boxer,”
Adelman embodies all the ideal traits of the street-smart protagonist.
Much is made, for example, of Adelman’s childhood poverty and iron-
fisted upbringing:“The early years of Skippy Adelman’s life made him
sick and unhappy, then coldly, bitterly furious. He started taking pic-
tures simply as a means of earning a living, and then suddenly discov-
ered his camera was a graphic instrument.”22 According to the tenets
of hard-boiled fiction, the protagonist’s knowledge of the city is a
legacy stemming from a working-class childhood that serves as a first-
hand introduction to urban violence. Published in April , the ar-
ticle appeared two months before Weegee’s Naked City.
It is against this backdrop of actual hardship and popular represen-
tations of news work that we must consider the press photographers’
impulse to craft written narratives that effectively turned tribulations
into manly conquests. This is especially pertinent to discussions of
Weegee’s work. Even in the wake of recent photographic scholarship,
with its attendant interest in post-structuralism and cultural studies, he
is often still viewed uncritically as photography’s noir hero, his images
currently enjoying a resurgent interest as film noir assumes greater
ubiquity in American culture. Take, for example, Allene Talmey’s de-
scription in a  essay, which introduces Weegee by way of pulp
clichés: “He used his camera not to celebrate the people he photo-
graphed, but to make a living, a narrow, spare living. What he wanted
was the freedom to be Weegee: some fame, some money (but not
much) and women were the triple peaks of his desires.”23 Or John
Coplan’s “Weegee the Famous”: “There is a frantic edge to Weegee’s
imagery. He worked at a pointblank range and at a desperate pitch, the
better to catch people in the raw. . . . His own tawdriness led him to
where few other photographers were willing to go. . . .”24

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First and foremost, Coplan’s last statement is simply wrong. A glance

at the online Daily News archive or the recently published New York
Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive shows that, in fact, from
the s through the s, news photographers were flocking to ex-
actly the same type of crime scenes Weegee covered; in some cases, to
the very same corpse.25 Furthermore, Talmey and Coplan simply re-
peat the rhetorical conceits Weegee adopted in his own writing, thus
perpetuating not only a romanticized perception of the photographer
but, more troublingly, an ahistoricism endemic to the field of journal-
ism itself. Problematically, as scholars like Hanno Hardt have recently
argued, “journalists have never acquired a collective sense of them-
selves” and journalism as a field still suffers from a profound and
deeply ironic “lack of historical consciousness.”26 In large part, this is
because media critics, biographers, and autobiographers have glossed
over the daily conditions of news work in the interest of presenting it
either as a celebration of media institutions or as a dramatic account
of star reporters and photographers.
Rather than succumbing to such glamorization, we gain a better ap-
preciation of Weegee’s work if we consider the representational ex-
change that emerged between news photographers and the popular
media from the late s through the s. While popular fiction
and film were casting the photographer in the role of city tough, news
photographers were re-appropriating this image and using it to give
credence to their work. What’s more, they were adopting it as a mode
in which to write their own autobiographical responses to the mean
streets. On the surface, autobiography bears a compelling parallel to
newspaper photography: both are genres utterly dependent upon the
appearance of spontaneity and unmediated documentary veracity. The
news photograph purports to offer a decisive moment untainted by
obvious manipulations; autobiography is what Jacques Derrida calls
“the ear of the Other” into which the teller can recount events truth-
fully.27 Despite this appearance of unmediated telling, however, auto-
biography obviously allows its author much control over what will be
recorded and how the tale will be told. It is not surprising that Weegee
and his contemporary news photographers were interested in this
genre, then, for autobiography allowed them, at last, an unprecedented
degree of control over the words describing their images. In the first
half of the century (and to a large extent even today), the press pho-
tographer generally had no say over the captions that accompanied his
photographs. Nor would he have been allowed to voice an opinion
about any other aspect of the image’s utilization. Typically, his photos
were enlisted to illustrate “good stories”: stories about crimes of pas-
sion, revenge, love betrayed or restored. Consequently, according to
A.D. Coleman, press photos are “likely to be stereotypical and
ephemeral. Their most logical vehicle, thus, is the ephemeral publica-

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tion, particularly the daily newspaper.”28 Writing accounts of his life

and work thus provided a news photographer with some promise of
durability; if his photographs were destined for the trash bin, his writ-
ten accounts, in book form, might remain on readers’ shelves. Further-
more, writing an autobiography validated the photographer’s identity
by bringing into view what generally remains hidden behind the
camera: his body itself. In these autobiographies, we find repeated as-
sertions of the masculine physical presence, one associated with intru-
siveness, transgression, and even violence. Each of these photographer-
cum-authors depicts his adventures in rough-edged language and
imagery, placing himself as a maverick within the drama of the city’s
crimes. No longer simply dispensable “picture snatchers,” Weegee and
other photographer-authors locate themselves prominently within the
frame.
A number of features in these news photographer’s autobiographies
clearly situate them within a hard-boiled literary tradition. Most ob-
vious is a valorization of a masculine realm unsullied by feminine ac-
tivity. Like their contemporary male pulp novelists who, as scholar
Erin Smith puts it, were trying “to wrest control of a specific section
of the literary marketplace for men and manly fiction from the
women who had dominated the field,” these autobiographers aggres-
sively staked out territory in a genre that, because of its associations
with self-reflection and soul-searching, could be construed as wom-
anly.29 Thus, many of them overtly insist on separation from feminine
company, which is presented as stultifying and claustrophobic. Norman
Alley’s I Witness (), for example, is dedicated to “the five who stayed
at home—my mother, my wife, Dexter, Noreen, and Janet.”30 These
words invite us to see the author as a male adventurer away from the
crowded, girlish household. Sammie Schulman’s dedication in Where’s
Sammy? ()—“To Gertie, who let me out of the house, so that
some of these things could happen”—performs the same function.31
Each of these autobiographies is composed of two types of narratives:
those in which the photographer works or travels alone, and those in
which he engages aggressively with male colleagues and members of
stereotypically masculine professions such as prizefighters, police, mili-
tary men, and gangsters. Little mention is made of female reporters,
editors, or other photographers, and when women do appear, they are
generally wives and mothers, or, alternatively,“dolls” and “cupcakes.”
It is interesting to note that many times these autobiographies fla-
grantly aggrandize the work of the photographer as being much more
blunt, and therefore manly, than that of his intellectually emasculated
reporter colleagues. Take, for example, Schulman’s explanation of how
a reporter is able to gloss over the messiness of life: “A reporter can
write around a story; a reporter can soften a blow by a simple twist of
his typing finger. He can surround with the luster of adjectives and

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fine writing an individual or event that has no intrinsic luster. He can

make a bum out of a great person, and vice versa. That’s because the
human mind is so much more versatile, and inexact, than is the cam-
era. When you pull the trigger on a news picture you are recording
the unadorned truth. You get the works; there’s no way to change
things, or pretty them up or make them worse. There’s no ‘x’ key on
a Speed Graphic. That black box we wield is a terribly revealing
weapon.”32 According to this description, reportorial writing is not
only a feminized practice—it “softens,” and, like a woman’s furniture
polish, adds “luster” when needed—it is also dishonest. Photography,
on the other hand, possesses all the brutal facticity of death. Like com-
mitting a murder, taking a photograph is irreversible and absolute. Ig-
noring the very common practices of photographic touch-ups, com-
posites, and other types of manipulation in press photography, Schulman
deliberately casts photography as a medium of absolute reliability to
denigrate the rival medium of written reportage. The irony, of course,
is that he is writing his autobiography as he makes these claims.
Akin to this denigration of reporters is the marked tendency of
these photographers to downplay a lack of formal education while si-
multaneously advancing news work as the ideal site for streetwise,
practical learning. Smith remarks that hard-boiled writing “often
ridiculed high culture, pointing to the superiority of practical knowl-
edge possessed by working men.”33 Like the hero of pulp fiction, the
photographer-author insists he gets his knowledge of the city first-
hand. This anti-intellectual, naïve stance towards photojournalism is in
fact one of the dominant traits of Weegee’s writing. It ensures that the
reader understands both the photographer and his work as authentic,
untainted by literary or academic concerns.
Many of these photographers also adopt a pose of wry irony toward
all they survey, including themselves. This detachment signals an un-
willingness to confront the emotional and psychological demands
placed upon the photographer by his profession. Schulman, for ex-
ample, explains that “Early in my career I had to learn to choke off all
thought of personal consideration, of myself or the subject to be pho-
tographed.”34 When Schulman introduces his story about watching a
suicide victim stand on a ledge for nearly twenty-four hours only for
him to “hit the pavement with a thudding crash that was sickening to
hear,” he describes the victim in typical hard-boiled language as a
“nice looking guy with a bad case of mopes.”35 Furthermore, as an
extension of this distancing effect, these authors rarely allow any ex-
pressions of self-pity or complaint. For example, after a twenty-one
hour work day, Alley writes:“Thus ended another day that already had
advanced well into the next. Night work, for a newsreel grinder, is all
in the day’s work. I decided to call it a day as I yawned, put on my hat
through a fatigue-fog, and headed for my own little Shangri-la.”36 In

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prose that could have been lifted right out of Raymond Chandler or
Dashiell Hammett, the news photographer describes how he, like the
private detective, ends his workdays in the middle of the night, heading
for the marginal space of his bachelor apartment as a temporary retreat.
The “picturesque line of vernacular and professional lingo” that one
critic in  observed in Hammett’s fiction makes full appearance in
these autobiographies.37 Choppy syntax and slang abound, and figura-
tive language tends to be wisecracking. Alley, for instance, opens his
chapter on China by describing Shanghai as “wrapped up like a cheap
gift in cellophane.”38 Schulman says he “felt like a chained homing pi-
geon,” and at another point remarks that “There was a war coming.
Even the dogs in the street knew it.”39 Furthermore, each of these au-
tobiographies exemplifies critic Greg Forter’s observation that hard-
boiled description moves “from object to object with a certain restless
but alert rapidity . . . it quickly exhausts the thing that it sees, takes it in
at a glance, and swallows it whole.”40 Schulman’s details of a bordello
are a case in point:“There was a special section set aside for the Japa-
nese whores. The odor of spices, sandalwood, and cheap incense over-
hung it. A long line of red and white lanterns marked its location . . . .
Every pay-as-you-enter guest who partook of the geisha goodies was
required to park his footgear on the bamboo threshold.”41 Many of
the descriptions in these autobiographies aim for a kind of objectiv-
ity that one might, in fact, describe as an attempt to mimic the op-
erations of a camera, the camera serving as a metaphor for these writ-
ers’ interest in direct and seemingly neutral description.42
Formally, these autobiographies utilize an episodic, picaresque struc-
ture, their narratives entirely shaped by dramatic accounts of how the
author managed to get—or occasionally lose—difficult pictures.
Rarely are the merits of any photographs themselves mentioned, nor
are photographic techniques much discussed; what matters instead is
the photographer’s sense of enterprise and courage. And yet, for all
this seeming attention to the photographer’s actions, there appears to
be an even greater emphasis—as there is in detective fiction—on how
the photographer’s insight and sheer physical presence enable him to
procure what he wants. Stephen Knight identifies this trait in Chan-
dler, observing that his detective’s “personal value, not his active de-
tection, is the structural focus . . . .”43 Nowhere is this more evident
than in Weegee’s notorious promotion of his supposed ability to pre-
dict impending accident, fires, and murders.
Finally, these autobiographies often end with a notable absence of
closure, encouraging us to read the conclusion as the opportunity for
the photographer to get back to the “real” work of picture-taking.
John Sturrock observes that “Autobiography is written in times of
respite from an immediate experience of the world, the autobiog-
rapher having found a provisional asylum from the gross intrusions on

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his consciousness of both history and humankind.”44 Yet the news

photographer implies at the end of his narrative that writing his au-
tobiography has been a somewhat painful respite, since it has dis-
tracted him from the more active, manly work of photography. At the
end of his autobiography, Schulman catalogues a list of over twenty
photographic projects he wants to make, finalizing his book with the
question “Who’s going to stop me?” Weegee ends Naked City with a
chapter on photographic tips, as if the act of writing an autobiog-
raphy needs to be legitimized by a return to practical matters of
photography.

II: Naked Autobiography

While no record remains to tell us if Weegee read any of his contem-
poraries’ autobiographies during the years he was expanding his own
hard-boiled narratives, we do know that as a boy he consciously shaped
himself after pulp icons; in Weegee by Weegee, he tells us: “I tried to
model myself after Horatio Alger, who as a newsboy went from rags to
riches. But I soon came to the conclusion that Horatio must have been
a phony . . . . So I stopped reading about Horatio Alger and turned to
Nick Carter. The famous detective became my new hero. . . .”45
His rejection of a higher-culture literary model in favor of a hero
whose hard-knock life more accurately reflected his own experiences
aligns Weegee solidly with the working class men whose reading
habits Smith reconstructs in her study of American pulp fiction be-
tween the wars. Smith argues that men in Weegee’s social class—
white, blue-collar workers with little formal education, frequently
speaking English as a second language—turned to hard-boiled fiction
because it gave them, in Kenneth Burke’s words, “equipment for liv-
ing.” These readers appreciated that “hard-boiled detective stories
were centrally concerned with the loss of workplace autonomy, the
appropriation of white men’s historic privilege by women and uppity
ethnics, and the diminished importance of production work compared
with consumption. . . . If one were still enmeshed in the dense net-
works of kin and culture that defined ethnic enclaves, hard-boiled
detective stories addressed one as a man for whom work was all-
consuming and family and community ties almost completely ab-
sent.”46 If hard-boiled literature, and by extension, its filmic counter-
parts, offered an escape from the anxieties of blue-collar labor, it is easy
to see why it would appeal to Weegee and his fellows in the news
trade who often lived hand-to-mouth, were rarely granted a photo
credit, and were viewed as machines churning out images for rapid
consumption by the news public.
With the lessons he learned from the tabloids about hyping a story
and using images and text to create dramatic appeal,Weegee was ideally

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positioned to project a bravado persona in a variety of social settings

and across multiple media.“Weegee was always busy creating Weegee,
constantly in the midst of a long campaign of self-improvement, engi-
neering a bigger and better Weegee,” remarked his editor and friend,
Louis Stettner.47 One of his first moves towards creating this “bigger
and better” self was to adopt a punchy new name, one that worked as
a singularizing gesture. In the s, an age when gangsters wore
monikers like “Bugs” Moran,“Baby Face” Nelson, and “Bugsy” Siegel,
he adopted “Weegee,” and announced he had an instinctive, almost
paranormal ability to be on the scene before a crime took place. For
him, as well as for these gangsters, a jazzy appellation provided a means
of projecting a celebrity persona. At the same time, it suggested a do-
main of perpetual male youth, a closed system in which men were fa-
miliar and playful enough with each other, as well as confident enough
in their masculinity, to use such designations. Such name recognition
was remarkable in a period when most news photographers never re-
ceived credit for their photos and easily slid into anonymity.
Weegee also carefully commodified his own physical image during
these years, appearing in well over a hundred publicity shots. Showing
him in his seedy apartment, in paddy wagons (see Figure ), and on
dark streets, these images not only recall the lighting and composition
of his own work, but also function as literal illustrations of the yarns
he was always spinning about himself in interviews and articles. More-
over, in most of these images Weegee is pictured holding his Speed
Graphic camera, thus asserting that even while subject to another
photographer’s objectifying gaze he is busily engaged in his own acts
of domination. Several publicity photographs depict Weegee operat-
ing out of the car that he purchased in  to gain more mobility as
a freelance photographer (see Figure ). This car became an integral
part of the myths he circulated about his success; the only news pho-
tographer actually to have a police radio wired into his automobile, he
boasted constantly about the “shiny, new  maroon-colored Chevy
coupe.”48 During the s and s especially, gangsters like Al
Capone and Meyer Lanksy were often pictured alongside their auto-
mobiles, which functioned as visible signs of their wealth and capac-
ity for stylish consumption. Like the gangsters of his time period who
kept their cars fully equipped with machine guns and other tools of
their “trade,” Weegee loaded his with his own ammunition: “My car
became my home. It was a two-seater, with a special extra-large lug-
gage compartment. I kept everything there, an extra camera, cases of
flash bulbs, extra loaded holders, a typewriter, fireman’s boots, boxes of
cigars, salami, infra-red film for shooting in the dark, uniforms, dis-
guises, a change of underwear, and extra shoes and socks.”49 Thus,
while his personal appearance bespoke a marginalized lifestyle,
Weegee’s flashy automobile was meant to announce to the inhabitants

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Figure . Weegee in the paddy-wagon, ca. . Gelatin silver print. Unidentified photographer.
Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

of New York—particularly to other news workers—that there was

nothing shabby about his accomplishments. All of the settings in these
publicity shots are noir spaces. Just as we cannot picture Philip Mar-
lowe or Sam Spade out in the countryside, we cannot imaginatively
locate Weegee working anywhere beside these sites. In this sense, the
photographs operate on an almost cinematic level; each shot places
him in a slightly different scenario, yet each functions as part of the
ongoing chronicle he was perpetually creating about his life at the
center of urban chaos.
In , Weegee left the Acme news agency where he’d worked his
way up from the dark room, and became a freelance photographer,

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Figure . Weegee at the trunk of his Chevrolet, . Gelatin silver print. Unidentified photogra-
pher. Copyright Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

thereby capitalizing on the associations between masculinity and a

mode of work that signified adventure and independence. As a free-
lancer, he could portray himself more aggressively as a maverick an-
swerable to no one, and he gained a clear publicity advantage over
other news photographers who worked for major newspapers and
whose personalities were always subsumed by their corporate affilia-
tion. By , Weegee had achieved enough notice as a freelance to
appear as the subject of feature articles in such magazines as Popular
Photography and Life.50 These articles unabashedly glamorize the inde-
pendent photographer as an icon of recklessly uninhibited success.

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One piece reports, for example, that “for more than a year now,
[Weegee] has been speaking before New York Camera Clubs and
writing newspaper and magazine stories on the tricks of the trade that
enable him to gross more than $ a week”—a figure that, if true,
would have been somewhere between four to eight times as much as
the salary of a staff news photographer of the decade.51 A  Time
Magazine feature reports that “Weegee now makes about $, a
year and that more than keeps him in cigars.”52 Peppered with stories
of physical stunts, violent encounters with criminals, and perilous
schemes, the articles nevertheless retain a wisecracking joviality that is
shaped, we’re to assume, by Weegee himself. He quips in one article
that he’s “covered everything from debutante balls to hatchet mur-
ders,”53 and in another that most of his job is “just sitting around wait-
ing for some baby doll to toss a knife into her daddy.”54 These articles
suggest that Weegee’s snappy persona garnered as much popular ap-
peal as his photographs did. In fact, the photos the magazines print are,
in many cases, forgettable images that have never found their way into
Weegee’s collected works. Instead, the authors direct their attention to
his personal life, his peculiar living habits, and most importantly, the
hard-hitting, cigar-chomping sensibility that enabled him to succeed
in free-lance crime shooting.
In each of these articles, Weegee promulgates the autonomy and
lack of domesticity that links him to his pulp heroes and also distin-
guishes him from other press photographers who cannot maintain his
all-night, every night eagerness because of personal commitments. “I
have no wife,” he states in one interview. “No family. No home. . . .
Sure. I’d like to live regular. Go home to a goodlooking wife, a hot
dinner, a husky kid. But I guess I got film in my blood.”55 Such state-
ments clearly align Weegee with the film noir protagonist who, as
Dean Cannell notes, is typified by a lack of allegiance to any one par-
ticular space and can thus slip into any environment.56
This heroic ability to go anywhere by matter of principle reached
its pinnacle in Weegee’s career between  and , as his increas-
ing visibility led to a solo photographic exhibit at the Photo League
and inclusion of his work in two group exhibits at the Museum of
Modern Art. We might ask what it means that by the mid s im-
ages of urban decay and violence, which a decade earlier would cer-
tainly not have been perceived as museum-worthy subjects, were be-
ing received as art. Glorified accounts of Weegee’s career by Talmey
and others insist that the force of Weegee’s photographs as aesthetic
objects inevitably led curators to recognize their genius.Yet if we view
the museum in a larger historical context, the institutional reception
of Weegee’s images is more ambivalent. Critics have noted that by the
time a movement has been credited as artistically valid by the museums,
its creative moment has generally passed. As Antoine-Chrysostome

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Quatremere de Quincy comments on the museum’s impulse: “To dis-

place all these monuments, to gather up in this way the decomposed
fragments, to put the debris in a methodical order, and to make of such
a gathering a practical course in modern chronology: this is, for a
practical reason, to constitute ourselves as a dead nation; it is to attend
our own funeral while we are alive; it is to kill Art to write its history;
but it is not its history, it is an epitaph.”57 Thus, while the museum can
undeniably fill a valuable historical function, its impulse to collect and
categorize has unpleasant associations with the morgue where artifacts
are labeled and filed away as evidence of past activity. The museum’s
interest in Weegee’s news work signaled a transition period wherein
the hard-boiled aesthetic that had been a vital presence in the daily
press for a decade and a half began slowly to be tamed, removed from
its working-class tabloid context, and polished up as a cultural relic.
In terms of Weegee’s immediate career, however, the museum ex-
hibits demonstrated that his images could have a value beyond the
fleeting world of the daily newspapers. For the first time, he could
view himself as more than just a documentarian of the city’s harsher
side; he had made himself into an artist, into “Weegee the Famous,”
and his new visibility gave him the cultural validation to market him-
self in a full-scale book. In , one year after the second MoMA
show, he published Naked City, a collection of two-hundred and
twenty-five photographs of New York with accompanying text. The
apotheosis of his work, Naked City promised a more discerning audi-
ence for his pictures—one that might view him as an accomplished
creative mind rather than, as one critic in  called him, “a mere
hack peddling his gruesome wares for a living.” The book created a
permanent repository for his images; even more crucially, it provided
an ideational site in which he could write about their meanings in re-
lation to himself. While Naked City is not typically read as autobiogra-
phy—perhaps because Weegee did eventually publish a prose memoir—
it is so subjective and so self-referential that it begs to be considered as
such. In part, this is because it is a profoundly narrative work, one that
uses the relatively new format of the photo essay to expand upon the
storytelling urge so obvious in early articles and interviews.58 One re-
markable aspect of Naked City, in fact, is how it incorporates images
both striking and insipid in the service of narrative. Long before
Weegee’s prose memoir, we encounter all the earlier-enumerated
characteristics of hard-boiled autobiography coming into play here.
By giving Naked City an episodic structure (the book falls into
eighteen chapters on different subjects), Weegee was able to cluster
photos and text thematically, building up tension and release in cumu-
lative bursts and exploiting the narrative power of his broad range of
images. While very few of the shots are linked in the way that we tra-
ditionally think of a “photo-sequence”—that is, with one photograph

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taken after another in progression at the same scene—their arrange-

ment in the book emphasizes that we should read them consecutively
as elements of a longer whole. The demands of working with se-
quences as well as the need to integrate text and image forced Weegee
to take on specific artistic challenges he would never have had to en-
gage had he chosen to publish Naked City simply as a collection of
photographs with minimal captioning. As W.J.T. Mitchell details in
Picture Theory, the conditions for a photo-sequence’s success are some-
what paradoxical; there must be equality and collaboration between text
and image, yet the two media must be independent of one another.59
Obviously, these requirements are not easily balanced, since they may
actually undercut one another. Yet Naked City met these challenges,
allowing Weegee a new narrative space to negotiate the relationship
between his images and the urban masculine discourse that had al-
ready shaped his persona.
For the most part, the chapters of Naked City open with a page of
text meditating upon the photos, followed by the images themselves.
The text firmly insists that we must imagine Weegee himself at each
of the depicted scenes, not simply as an objective reporter but as a par-
ticipant in the drama. In his opening chapter “A Book is Born,”
Weegee says “I caught New Yorkers with their masks off. . . . What I
felt I photographed, laughing and crying with them.”60 It is worth
noting that the only photograph in this section is a portrait of Weegee
himself posed with his camera—the same image with which we
opened this essay. The text and the single image work together to sug-
gest that the scenes we are about to witness are as much a reflection
of Weegee’s inner self as they are urban documents.
As in the autobiographies by Adelman and other street photogra-
phers, much of Weegee’s text in Naked City underscores his own
working-class background. To accompany a series of images from the
Bowery, for example, Weegee writes:“Not so long ago I, too, used to
walk on the Bowery, broke, ‘carrying the banner.’ The sight of a bed
with white sheets in a furniture store window, almost drove me crazy.
God . . . a bed was the most desirable thing in the world. . . . I didn’t
have a nickel to my name. But I was a Free Soul . . . with no respon-
sibilities. . . .”61 Consciously written as a survival narrative, this passage
utilizes hyperbole and emphasizes Weegee’s autonomy to efface any
sense of self-pity. It also demonstrates how Weegee’s text often adopts
characteristics of what scholar William Howarth calls “dramatic auto-
biography,” a mode characterized by an author who is “unpretentious
and impertinent, viewing life as a staged performance that he may at-
tend, applaud, or attack as he pleases.”62
In addition to the blocks of text Weegee interweaves with pho-
tographs, he frequently labels the frame of individual images with
shorter captions. These are often laconic, punctuated by terse, seem-

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ingly unpremeditated phrases. Frequently, they strike the reader with

the same cynicism and sense of the grotesque one finds in James M.
Cain or Horace McCoy. As Coplan notes, Weegee’s captions “often
imposed upon the documents he stored up the accents of a certain
kind of pulp fiction.”63 Take, for example, a photograph paired with
the following words:“In the Line-Up Room. This guy killed a cop in
a hold up. First he got a black eye . . . then the electric chair in Sing
Sing Prison.”64 The punchy text would work as well for a line in a
noir film as it does for this image of a bruised man circled by plain-
clothes agents. We can read a wry sense of humor about death’s drama
in the caption “Balcony Seats at a Murder” below a photo of residents
peering from their windows to a dead man lying on the ground.65
Likewise, a noirish fatalism is obvious in the caption accompanying an
image of wildly excited children shoving to get a closer look at a
corpse; Weegee writes “A woman relative cried . . . but dead-end kids
enjoyed the show when a small-time racketeer was shot and killed.”66
The two latter photographs typify Weegee’s interest in capturing re-
sponses to criminal events. Through Weegee’s lens, peripheral on-
lookers are frequently transformed into the photographic subject. We
might read these responding figures as ciphers for Weegee himself, a
visual metaphor for the photographer at the margins of society, con-
stantly trying to get a better view of the action.
Weegee’s verbal rhetoric in these instances and through much of
Naked City follows Chandler and Hammett’s infamous dictates that
language must be direct, simple, and American in tone. There is the
same obvious display of resistance in Naked City to what Chandler, in
“The Simple Art of Murder,” called the “heavy crust of English gen-
tility and American pseudogentility.”67 And, as in Woolrich, Cain, and
a host of other hard-boiled writers as well as in most of the auto-
biographies authored by photographers in this period, Weegee’s style
is class conscious, demonstrating a preference for speech coded as
“lower-class” over that associated with a more refined elite. Slang words
and phrases like “bumped-off,” “high-class,” “go for,” and “cutie”
abound in Naked City. So do incorrect grammar, misspellings, and syn-
tactical peculiarities like an extreme dependence upon ellipsis.
A strong narrative impulse is apparent even in single photos; in sev-
eral, such as “Tired Inspection,”“Simply Add Boiling Water,” and “On
the Spot,” Weegee carefully frames the shot to capture a street sign or
writing within the image (see Figures  and ).68 The writing functions
as ironic commentary on the represented actions, as if the world is
captioning itself without the photographer needing to add any exter-
nal text. Critic Clive Scott has termed photographs similar to this “re-
bus images”; in Scott’s view, this type of picture, generally used in ad-
vertising, is unavoidably simplistic because the image’s meaning
depends completely on the viewer’s getting the encoded “pun.”69

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Figure . Weegee (Arthur Fellig), Simply Add Boiling Water, . Gelatin silver print. Copyright
Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

While it is true that such images are individually less flexible than
those without an enclosed caption, Weegee uses this device in several
chapters of Naked City to create tonal contrast within a sequence of
images. As such, the rebus image acts as a moment of dark comedy
rather than an end in itself. Weegee’s incorporation of this device also
points to the degree to which he had been trained by news work to
see visual images as just one part of a story that could be fully fleshed
out only by the interaction of pictures with text.70
Naked City’s arrangement of photos and text consistently prioritizes
the development of a story over showcasing individual photographs.

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Figure . Weegee (Arthur Fellig), On the Spot, ca. . Gelatin silver print. Copyright
Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images.

Miles Barth notes that in at least one case, Weegee re-captions images
that originally appeared in PM magazine in order to highlight their
drama, making the “story” more tragic than when it appeared in its
factual news context.71 In some sections, thematically related photos
follow the classic Freytag’s Triangle formula of plot development, in
which exposition and rising action lead to a climax before falling to a
resolution. Chapter Three,“Fires,” is a good example of how Weegee
joins images from separate occasions to create one sustained narrative.
The first image falls into the category of the rebus detailed above, ask-
ing us to smile wryly at the irony of a burning hotdog factory with
the aforementioned billboard reading “Just Add Boiling Water” visible
through the smoke and steam. The image is shot from a distance, em-
phasizing the height of the “Highgrade Frankfurters” sign atop the

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burning building and ensuring that we are kept far enough away from
any human figures to avoid sensing panic or grief. Subsequently, a se-
ries of rescue photos establishes the rising action, featuring citizens de-
scending ladders or being escorted from danger by firefighters. One
photo even shows a young man grinning broadly at the camera as he
descends a ladder’s steps.72 Many of these photos have no margin cap-
tions, and thus we are encouraged to read them as episodes in the
story of a single fire. These human rescues are followed by two images
of saved pets. While these photos smack of kitsch and are visually un-
interesting in themselves, they emphasize the degree to which Weegee
used each image as part of an unfolding drama rather than for isolated
effect.73 The next few photos demonstrate that fire is both democratic
and, indeed, tragic. An element of foreshadowing is injected into our
reading experience as we see that the peculiar smiles of the preceding
figures are gone, and now everyone looks distraught: an anxious man
holds a Torah rescued from a synagogue, a woman collapses on a
stretcher, a woman clutches her baby, a shocked couple stares at their
burning building.74 Jokiness and the relief suggested by the earlier im-
ages give way to a growing sense of horror, and indeed, the next im-
ages show the tragedies of fire. Rows of body bags in two photos lead
up to one of Weegee’s most famous images, depicting two women
watching helplessly as their relatives burn to death in an apartment.
The photo is captioned in its margin with the words “I Cried when
I Took This Picture.” Weegee’s insistence on inserting his own re-
sponse into the caption asserts his place as a participant in the city’s
story.The image is one of his most arresting, and its position here makes
use of our conditioned response that approximately three-quarters of
the way into a dramatic narrative the rising action must result in a cli-
max. Finally, the last three images in the chapter give the reader a sense
of denouement by focusing on the exhaustion of the firefighters.
The hard-boiled autobiographical impulse of Naked City plays out
in its concluding chapters. The penultimate chapter, “Personalities,”
includes a portrait of the elderly Alfred Stieglitz and, as an aesthetic
counterpoint, an image of Pat Rich,“Virtuoso of the Cheesecake (leg)
photo.”75 Both images are accompanied by extensive meditation on
the role of the photographer. Suggesting that Stieglitz is “a failure,”
Weegee indicts the elderly master for his ethereal focus on highbrow
goals, and asks us to see himself as a populist rescuer of the tradition
Stieglitz had left in flaccid debilitation.76 Conversely, Rich is presented
as a more positive role model. The fact that, as Weegee recounts, so
many of his images require censoring by “an artist who painted
panties over the tights,” only accentuates the uninhibited gusto
Weegee obviously valorizes.77 Yet, despite this masculine vigor, Rich
lacks the cultural ambition Weegee identifies with Stieglitz. Each pho-
tographer thus functions as an opposing pole on a continuum, from

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the extreme aesthete to the explicit populist. Just as he uses the photo-
essay format to balance between tough hard-boiled street tales and the
glossy aesthetic of the museum, Weegee asks us to see himself as the
innovator of a photographic vision that melds Stieglitz’s enterprise with
the uninhibited potency of Rich’s girlie shots. Weegee’s final chapter,
the text only “Camera Tips,” emphasizes this, suggesting that readers
should recognize “Weegee the Famous” as a successor to these men.

III:Voiceover
Given his mastery at utilizing every available media for autobiography,
and considering the symbiosis between tabloids and entertainment me-
dia during the period, it seems inevitable that Weegee himself would
end up in Hollywood. A year after Naked City’s publication, hoping to
boost book sales, he sold the movie rights to producer Mark Hellinger
and signed on as consultant for the film. Arguably the most famous of
the period’s crime semi-documentaries, The Naked City () im-
mediately announces its allegiance to Weegee’s thematic motifs by fea-
turing shots of city streets, children at play, and working-class crowds.
Each of these faces might have stepped off the pages of Naked City,
and cinematographer William H. Daniels frames many shots to em-
phasize the diverse physiognomy of the cast.
Yet as one of the first representatives of the crime semi-documentary,
the film deliberately resists incorporating a hard-boiled tone or noir
aesthetic elements, aiming instead to offer a less stylized, more au-
thoritative treatment of crime. The film’s affinity with Weegee’s im-
ages probably speaks more to director Jules Dassin’s desire to capture
news photography’s associations with objectivity and realism than
Weegee’s penchant for psychological drama or visual showmanship.
This difference between book and film is crucial, since it emphasizes
that the cultural currency of the hard-boiled ethos was quickly fad-
ing. By the late s and into the s, Hollywood films took hard-
boiled tropes to nearly comical excess. Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil
() is the most famous example of this trend, but strains of self-
reflexive parody run through earlier titles. With their fantastic plots
and thematic hyperbole, Steve Sekely’s The Scar (), Rudolph
Mate’s D.O.A. (), and John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle () tes-
tify to an increasing flamboyance in the canon, as if Hollywood were
making fun of the noir mode even as it attempted to wring out its last
elements of appeal. By the mid-s, as Nicole Rafter notes, film
noir’s “scenarios and leitmotifs became not only worn but also un-
timely” as American crime film entered a period of dormancy.78
In other media, too, the tough guy persona was exhausted. Black
Mask ceased publishing in . By then “the cardboard figure of the
breezy shamus [had] . . . punched his way through a thousand paper-

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back novels, a thousand scenarios” observes Geoffrey O’ Brien.“The de-

gree of witlessness in the wisecracking and sadism in the punchouts
varies from author to author, but the net effect is equally stultifying . . .
a pall settles over the determined reader as he plows his way through
the tired shenanigans of these animated clichés.”79 Perhaps no anec-
dote better illustrates the dead end of the hard-boiled mode than that
of Raymond Chandler attempting to write a novel which concluded
with Marlowe falling in love and finally marrying.80 Chandler was un-
able to finish the book: he simply could not narrate such a drastic shift
in his character’s existential framework.
Likewise,Weegee’s narrative ingenuity seems to have reached a dead
end after he moved to Hollywood, and as his persona became more
outlandishly hackneyed, his popularity waned. While he would go on
to publish seven more books including Weegee by Weegee, his works af-
ter the mid s unwittingly present him as an increasingly lecher-
ous caricature of the now passé tough guy. His earlier written banter
about “cuties” in urban locales, for example, devolves into rambling
sexual brag.“In their dressing rooms, the strippers welcomed me with
open arms and open bras,” one anecdote proceeds.“One of the strip-
pers gave me a present that was very close to her . . . her G-string. She
autographed it, ‘The Cupcake Girl.’ I was so fascinated by her cup-
cakes that of course, I photographed them. A real work of art.”81 Over
the next two decades until his death in , he wandered from Cal-
ifornia to Europe and back to New York, shooting girly pictures and
trick photos he was able to sell, ironically, only to foreign tabloids.
Thirty-five years later, however, Weegee is enjoying more celebrity
than he did even at the height of his career. His photographs have
been featured in at least ten major exhibitions in the United States
since , including shows at the International Center for Photogra-
phy in  and in . At least ten collections of his images, as well
as reprints of Naked City, Weegee’s People, and The Village, have been
published within the last decade, each accompanied by a newly writ-
ten or revised introductory essay on the photographer’s cultural rele-
vance. The Public Eye, a feature film based on his life, was released in
. Directed by Howard Franklin, the film stars Joe Pesci and Bar-
bara Hershey, and features Weegee’s photos prominently throughout.
Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art’s gift shop now sells sets of
Weegee postcards and other knick-knacks, including pens, notebooks,
and even pillows. If the trajectory of his career parallels the rise and
fall of hard-boiled style during the s and s, this newer cul-
tural cachet reinforces how that style has made a serious comeback.
Part of this resurgent attention to Weegee is due to the explosion,
since the late s, of critical interest in photographic history and
theory. Yet it is more importantly a reflection of our culture’s current
fascination with noir, as James Naremore has comprehensively de-

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tailed. Expanding on Naremore, Paula Rabinowitz argues for an un-

derstanding of film noir as a key “context” of American culture, a leit-
motif running through the twentieth century whose “plot structure
and visual iconography make sense of America’s landscape and his-
tory.”82 If this is so, we must ask what the current fascination with noir
allows us to “make sense” of. What picture of crime and urban decay
does this retrofitted film fantasy allow us to frame?
One answer is that today’s fetish for noir style is a backlash against
the tabloid’s hyperbolic representations of transgression, which have
seen a renaissance in television programs such as A Current Affair,
America’s Most Wanted, and Cops. These programs target working class
viewers with garish crime reports featuring offenders subdued by
teams of paramilitary-weapon-bearing police. Film noir, in contrast,
dishes up crime coolly, inviting viewers into the minds of underworld
figures who are martini-dry and awfully good-looking. At this histor-
ical distance, noir style presents crime gentrified for an ironic middle-
brow sensibility, a trend likewise evident in the current popularity of
vintage crime photography: in addition to the fascination with
Weegee, consider the recent spate of art books based on other grim
pictures from his era. Boasting titles like New York Noir, Evidence, Sins
of the City:The Real L.A. Noir, and Shots in the Dark:True Crime Pho-
tos, these expensive editions remove crime pictures from their origi-
nal contexts on tabloid pages or forensic files and reprint them on
glossy paper for the coffee tables of affluent consumers.
In this light, it is also worth noting Curtis Hansen’s  L.A. Con-
fidential. Touted as “tough, gorgeous, and vastly entertaining,” the film
stands as one of the most successful neo-noir films produced in the
s. L.A. Confidential draws attention to the sensationalism of the
tabloid realm through the character of editor Sid Hudgens, played by
Danny DeVito. We soon learn that the compromising photographs he
procures for his Hush-Hush magazine are at the root of every scandal,
every plot twist, and every corruption of character in the film. By fo-
cusing on Hush-Hush magazine’s seamy associations, encouraging
viewers to relish its tabloid taboos, and then making Hudgens’s mur-
der a turning point in its resolution, the film cleverly suggests that its
own noir slickness can glamorize scandal and literally silence Hush-
Hush’s rude, loquacious voice. The film makes overt the very process
by which the larger retro-noir movement absorbs, tames, and then dis-
tances itself from the tabloids.
By isolating hard-boiled style and film noir from the tabloids, how-
ever, we lose sight of their relationship with a medium that has his-
torically challenged the hegemonic dominance of mainstream culture.
As Kevin Glynn notes,“the demonization of tabloid media by . . . the
well educated in general is evidence of the social forces working to
reinscribe and police certain boundaries that have been reconfigured

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by both multiculturalism and postmodernity, including those between

‘serious’ and ‘frivolous,’ ‘high’ and ‘low,’ ‘truth’ and ‘fiction,’ . . . the
‘hard’ and the ‘soft.’”83 It is a commonplace of media scholarship to
credit film noir as a subversive mode, and to note how its edgy depic-
tion of urban decay undercut positivist fantasies of the American
dream. Yet despite its recent flashback to cultural prominence, film
noir style is fated to become simply a historical artifact in the museum
of dead things unless we acknowledge its connection to the still liv-
ing, breathing—at times even panting—tabloids. Ultimately, as Weegee
and his lesser-known contemporaries demonstrated, hard-boiled cool
is hardly antithetical to effusive tabloid sensationalizing. Rather, crime
film and fiction share a longstanding exchange with tabloids, one that
press photographers of Weegee’s era expertly manipulated as they
shaped the stories American culture would tell about its darker
dreams.

Notes
 Miles Barth,“Weegee’s World,” in Weegee’s World, ed. Miles Barth (Boston: Bulfinch Press,
), .
 Silas Bent,“Journalistic Jazz,” Nation ( March ): .
 Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Routledge,
), .
 The Snyder picture, along with a host of other crime photos from the period, can be
found online at the Daily News Archives by clicking on the “New York Noir” page avail-
able at <http://www2.dailynewspix.com/index.asp>. See also William Hannigan, ed., New
York Noir: Crime Photos From the Daily News Archive (New York: Rizzoli, ).
 In addition to the texts we discuss, readers may also wish to consult the following as rep-
resentatives of this trend: Robert Van Gelder, Front Page Story (New York: Dodd, Mead,
and Co., ); Morton Sontheimer, Newspaperman:A Book About the Business (New York:
Whittlesey House, ); John J. Floherty, Shooting the News: Careers of the Camera Men
(Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, ); Bill Davidson, “Cop with a Camera,” Collier’s (
March ): –; and Mark Finley, “Crime Photography Pays,” The Camera ( January
): –.
 Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), chap-
ters  and . See also Nancy West, “Men in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Mas-
culinity, Photography, and the Death of Engraving in the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian
Institute Journal  (): –. For information on Kodak’s feminization of amateur pho-
tography, consult Nancy West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, ), Chapters  and . We are also indebted to Patricia Vettel Tom,
“Naked Shots: the Masculinization of American Photography, –” (Ph.D. diss.,
Washington University, ), Chapter . Yet while Tom focuses on Weegee in her chap-
ter on street photography, she pays almost exclusive attention to his photographs rather
than his narratives, and she locates her discussion within postwar discourses on masculin-
ity and photography. While her argument is both well researched and politically astute, it
strikes us as problematic to confine Weegee’s work to the postwar period, since he took
the majority of his street photographs in the s and early s. Her time frame also
necessarily excludes the early development of tabloid photography.
 As Barth notes, the exact year in which Weegee began working at Acme is uncertain. In
Weegee by Weegee, the photographer records it as , but Harold Blumenfield, an editor
at Acme who hired him, recalls the date as . Given the high number of inaccuracies
in Weegee’s autobiography, we tend to credit Blumenfield’s statement as more reliable.

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 John Coplan, “Weegee the Famous,” in Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935–1960 (New
York: Schirmer Art Books, ), .
 Richard R. Ness, From Headline Hunter to Superman: A Journalism Filmography (London:
Scarecrow Press, ).
 Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema,
1930–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
 David J. Krajicek, Scooped!: Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze, and
Celebrities (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
 Although there were several women who earned widespread popularity as news photog-
raphers during the s and s, it was a field substantially dominated by men. See Har-
riet Plotnick,“Newscamera-Girl,” in The Camera (February ): –.
 Samuel Taylor Moore,“Those Terrible Tabloids,” Independent ( March ): .
 Oswald Garrison Villard, “Are Tabloid Newspapers a Menace?” Forum , no. (April
): –.
 Aben Kandel,“A Tabloid a Day,” Forum , no.  (March ): .
 Simon Michael Bessie, Jazz Journalism:The Story of the Tabloid Newspapers (New York: E.P.
Dutton, ), .
 Kandel, .
 Kevin Glynn, Tabloid Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, ).
 Lest the exploits in the film be considered mere cinematic sensationalism, Morton
Sontheimer’s  book reports that “picture grabbing” occurred at even the more rep-
utable newspapers: “There’s no use denying that the shadier methods are still used in the
newspaper business, even on some papers with highly flaunted ideals. On such papers, the
owner or the editor might not approve of such methods, but he doesn’t know about them.
And for all his high-flown talk, he’ll demand just as vigorously to know why the opposi-
tion has a picture when his paper doesn’t. And the reply, ‘We couldn’t get it by honest
means,’ falls pretty flat.” Sontheimer, .
 George Harmon Coxe, “Murder Mixup,” in The Hard-Boiled Omnibus: Early Stories from
“Black Mask,” ed. Joseph T. Shaw (New York: Simon, ), .
 George Harmon Coxe, Triple Exposure: a George Harmon Coxe Omnibus (New York: Knopf,
), , –.
 Aron M. Mathieu,“The Hard-Boiled School of Photography: The Legend of Skip Adel-
man, PM’s Picture Ace,” Minicam Photography  (April ): .
 Allene Talmey,“Introduction,” in Weegee (New York: Aperture, ), .
 Coplan, .
 See the image captioned “On the Spot” in Weegee’s New York: Photographs 1935–1960, ,
and the shot of the same murder by Daily News photographer Willard, published in
William Hannigan, ed., New York Noir: Crime Photos From the Daily News Archive (New
York: Rizzoli, ), . Although the Willard photo is dated December , , and
Weegee’s is “ca. ,” they are clearly the same corpse photographed from the same
angle. The discrepancy in the date is similar to other dating inconsistencies in Weegee’s
records.
 Hanno Hardt,“Without the Rank and File: Journalism, History, Mediaworkers, and Prob-
lems of Representation,” in Newsworkers:Toward a History of the Rank and File, ed. Hanno
Hardt and Bonnie Brennan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography,Transference,Translation, ed. Christie Mc-
Donald, trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
).
 A.D. Coleman, Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media, and Lens Culture (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, ), –.
 Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled:Working Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia: Tem-
ple University Press, ), .
 Norman Alley, I Witness (New York: W. Funk, ), n.p.
 Sammy Schulman, Where’s Sammy?, ed. Robert Considine (New York: Random House,
), n.p.
 Schulman, .
 Smith, .

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 Schulman, .
 Ibid., .
 Alley, .
 Quoted in Smith, .
 Alley, .
 Schulman, , .
 Greg Forter, Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime
Novel (New York: New York University Press, ), .
 Schulman, .
 For a more extensive discussion of how hard-boiled prose mimics the operations of the
camera, see Ronald R. Thomas,“The Dream of the Empty Camera: Image, Evidence, and
Authentic American Style in American Photographs and Farewell, My Lovely,” Criticism 
(): –.
 Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
), .
 John Sturrock, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
 Weegee, Weegee by Weegee: An Autobiography (New York: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,
), .
 Smith, .
 Louise Stettner, ed., Weegee (New York: Knopf, ), .
 Weegee, Weegee by Weegee, .
 Ibid., .
 For an extensive bibliography of feature articles on Weegee published during this period,
see Barth’s Weegee’s World, –. Tellingly, although Barth also lists articles from later in
Weegee’s life, he does not include the less reputable ones, an omission we see as in keep-
ing with the critical tendency to gloss over later, less palatable aspects of the photographer’s
career.
 Norman C. Lipton, “Weegee Top Free-lance Tells How He Does It!” Photography Hand-
book  (): –, –.
 “Weegee,” Time ( July ): .
 Florence Meetze,“How Pop Photo Crashes an Opening,” Popular Photography (December
): .
 Rosa Reilly,“Free-Lance Cameraman,” Popular Photography (December ): .
 Reilly, .
 Dean MacCannell, “Democracy’s Turn: On Homeless Noir,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader,
ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, ), .
 Quoted in Theodor Adorno, “Valery Proust Museum,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ), .
 For further discussion on the relationship between photography and text in autobiogra-
phy, see Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing and Life Writing (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, ) and Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and
Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
 Weegee, Naked City [] (New York: Da Capo Press, ), . Ellipses in original.
 Ibid., . Ellipses in original.
 William Howarth,“Some Principles of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobiography:
Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .
 Coplan, .
 Weegee, Naked City, . Ellipses in original.
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., . Ellipses in original.
 Raymond Chandler,“The Simple Art of Murder,” in The Simple Art of Murder (New York:
Vintage Books, ), .
 Weegee, Naked City, , , and .
 Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, ),
–.

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 Given Weegee’s focus on text within photos, it is interesting to compare the two afore-
mentioned shots of the “On the Spot” murder taken by Weegee and Willard. Willard is
more concerned with framing the corpse, while Weegee’s image is developed to bring the
text on the white restaurant sign into better view.
 Barth, .
 While the sequence in this chapter asks us to read the man’s expression as relief at his res-
cue, a  Photography Handbook feature notes that Weegee often posed and reposed
scenes several times, asking the subject to repeat his escape until Weegee had captured a
satisfactory image. In marked contrast to Weegee’s self-promotion as a psychic photogra-
pher who could predict accidents, the article notes that Weegee “will often ask the par-
ticipants, if they’re still around, to re-enact their parts. They are usually willing to cooper-
ate because they like to see their pictures in the newspaper.” Although documentation
about the circumstances of Weegee’s images is sketchy at best, we surmise that a number
of photos which show people smiling at circumstantially bizarre moments—such as in a
photo of a girl grinning cheerfully at the camera while her apparently drowned boyfriend
is being given artificial respiration—may well have been staged. See Lipton, .
 These animal photos also illustrate the degree to which Weegee, as a professional news-
worker, was aware of the salability of human interest photos. For more on this, see Weegee’s
Secrets of Shooting With Photoflash as Told to Mel Harris (New York: Hartis Publishers, ).
In one section, Weegee instructs novice newshounds to “Look through today’s paper.
Chances are you’ll see a few pictures that have what is called human interest. Pictures
about babies . . . pets . . . they are sure fire” ().
 These photos are remarkable for the range of people Weegee saw as representative citi-
zens. For more on Weegee’s own ethnicity, see David Serlin and Jesse Lerner,“Weegee and
the Jewish Question,” Wide Angle , no.  (): –.
 Weegee, Naked City, .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 Nicole Rafter, Shots in the Mirror: Crime Film and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), .
 Geoffrey O’Brien, Hard-boiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (New York:
Da Capo Press, ), .
 Ibid., .
 Weegee, Weegee by Weegee, .
 Paula Rabinowitz, Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), .
 Glynn, .

 t h e ya l e j o u r n a l o f c r i t i c i s m