The sharp and stark look of Weegee, photographer of crime and glamor, is exhibited in Madrid

Madrid. He was an old-school photographer, one of those who furtively listened to the police radio frequency to arrive before anyone else at the scene of a crime, accident, fire or any event or tragedy that could be photographed. He was also one of those who went into prisons or dungeons to search prisoners or criminals, both white collar and serial killers.

Arthur H. Fellig, who signed and carried out his professional career under the name of Weegeebecame over the years a reference for high-profile photojournalists and the marginal circles of New York, but he was also one of the great photographers of film celebrities and Californian high society. The Mapfre Foundation presented, in collaboration with the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, an exhibition in Madrid, Weegee, autopsy of the showwhich shows his sharp and stark look.

The best photographer in the world

With a deep look and invariably with an immense cigar, he introduced himself like this: “My name is Weegee. “I am the best photographer in the world.” He was born in Ukraine in 1899, but he moved to New York as a child, at only 10 years old, where from a young age he learned about the underworld, the marginal neighborhoods and was always close to the violence generated by the metropolis, which in those years became in one of the battle centers of the Italian and Irish mafias.

From a very young age he was a certified photographer, with which he barely made a living, publishing his images in all types of newspapers and magazines, both the so-called serious as the most sensational and morbid. He, with his camera and his cigar in tow, made a name for himself among the city’s underworld and the most marginal criminals in the most extreme neighborhoods, but also among the police themselves and the rest of their colleagues in the profession.

In fact, he became the first journalist to obtain a license to carry a shortwave radio connected to the police frequency in his car, in 1938, although it was a method that he had already used on a daily basis for some time. The quality of his images, but above all the rawness of the scenes that he showed without concealment or filters, as they were, led to his work being exhibited in 1941 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a group exhibition.

From there, his work acquired cult dimensions and he himself, who sometimes signed his photos as “Weegeethe famous”, compiled his best images in 1945 in a book he called The naked city, and with which it ended up catapulting both the public and specialized critics.

The curator of the exhibition was Clément Chéroux, who in addition to being an expert on his work, is the director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, who explained that The photographs of the underworld and the marginal circles of the New York night of the 1930s and 1940s immediately achieved wide international recognition. But the same did not happen with the photographs he took after settling in Hollywood in 1948: images of Californian high society and the social life of the great film celebrities, whom he almost always portrayed in a markedly ironic or satirical way, sometimes as a result. of his subsequent work in the laboratory. At the time, critics emphasized the radical opposition between one period and the other, in a judgment that openly praised the first and disdained the images of the second..

The exhibition shows the two facets of the work of Weegeealthough in the images of Californian high society it can be seen, according to the curator, his critical vision of society and culture from a perspective that anticipated the well-known cultural and social analyzes around the society of the spectacle and that highlights the relevance of his critical view..

The exhibition in Madrid will remain until January 5, 2025.