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NME.com

Franz Ferdinand new album artwork unveiled – exclusive NME.com, UK - Nov 26, 2008 We wanted to get a Weegee vibe – that famous New York crime scene photographer from the '40s and '50s." For the full interview with the band see the new ...

Times Online

And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks by William S. Burroughs ... Times Online, UK - Nov 7, 2008 ... its depiction of bohemian downtown life in wartime New York - this is a book with all the monochromatic urban atmospherics of a photograph by Weegee. ...

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Weegee books

Weegee's New York: Photographs, 1935-1960

With 335 photos, this large size paperback is one of the better books you'll find of Weegee's work. Divided into eighteen photographic chapters (with one image per page) it really is an impressive selection, especially as it covers his output from 1935 to 1960.

The chapter on crime has the largest selection (thirty-one) with the predictable dead and bloodied bodies surrounded by police and public. Weegee claimed he (and several Speed Graphic cameras) covered hundreds of murders for the New York tabloids, he knew that that the only thing that mattered to the 'tabs' were the headlines and photos, the story could fill any space that was left.

Naked City

by: Weegee
Weegee knew what kind of photos the editors of the New York daily tabloids wanted, in-your-face gutsy black and whites to capture the reader's imagination over the breakfast table. He always delivered too. This reprint of his 1945 book captures the energy of the Big Apple and yet there are no shots of skyscrapers. Instead the (mostly) ordinary folk of the city are shown getting on with their lives and deaths.

Many of the photos are taken at night, a Weegee trademark. Inside buildings he used infrared film so he could shoot in near blackness and capture his subjects displaying emotions they would hide, had they known a camera was about.

Unknown Weegee

by: Luc Sante, Cynthia Young, Arthur 'Weegee' Fellig
A fine book of Weegee photos though the title is somewhat misleading. The International Center of Photography has over eighteen thousand of his photos so there could easily be dozens of books with exactly the same title. Of the 111 photos in the book probably less than half were actually published and they were certainly not printed with a 175 screen on glossy paper as they are here.

The photo selection is excellent and a typical cross-section of Weegee's output, down and outs sleeping in doorways, fire and crime scenes, cops and suspects, strippers, animals, the weather, celebrities (fortunately not too many) and plenty of photos of folks just looking at some street drama.

Weegee (Aperture Masters of Photography)

A very reasonably priced introduction to the work of this great photojournalist. Because his work depicts the rawness of New York life and primarily for tabloid papers I always thought the critical establishment regarded Weegee as a sideline contributor to American art photography but this book with fifty-five of his, perhaps best known, photos clearly puts him in the mainstream.

In the mid-forties after he went to Hollywood and basically stopped taking the gritty news photos he's famous for I thought his creativity declined, especially in the early fifties when Weegee played about with photo distortions (fortunately only one of these images is in the book) which seem not much more than an art student playing about.

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