“Street photography” doesn’t really have much to do with streets; it’s candid, in-the-moment photography that usually has to do with people and usually happens in an urban environment (since that’s where most of the people are). It’s like photojournalism, but without any notion that the images are “news” in any way. It’s just recording ordinary events.
Street photography dates back about as far as photography itself; some of the original daguerrotype photos (taken by Daguerre himself) date from about 1839. Street photography really began to thrive when cameras began to use commercial film and could be carried around.
In 1930s New York City, a variety of street photography arose that was stark, gritty, and was somewhere between pure street photography and photojournalism — it often depicted crime scenes, fires, victims, and emergency workers. Probably the leading practitioner was Ascher Fellig, whose widely popular work was published under his pseudonym, Weegee.
Weegee was born June 12, 1899 in Austria-Hungary (an area that’s now Ukraine), and emigrated to the US with his family when he was about 10. In New York he started very early in photography, working as an assistant, a darkroom technician, and a photographer when he was still a teenager.
He became a freelance photographer when he was in his 30s, and as he described it: “What I did simply was this: I went down to Manhattan Police Headquarters and for two years I worked without a police card or any kind of credentials. When a story came over a police teletype, I would go to it. The idea was I sold the pictures to the newspapers.” In addition to selling his photos to the tabloid newspapers like the New York Daily News, he was soon selling them to national publications like Life magazine, individually, and starting in the 1950s, books of his images.
He never explained where his nickname “Weegee” came from, but some people have speculated that he seemed to appear “like magic” at crime scenes, so “Weegee” could be the phonetic spelling of “Ouija,” as in “Ouija board,” a purportedly magical parlor game.
Weegee’s photo equipment was portable, but by today’s standards enormous; he used a “Speed Graphic” camera that used individual film plates that were 4 by 5 inches, and “flash bulbs” for lighting. To save time (and possibly also because he was self-taught and claimed not to know that much about photography), he preset his camera to a particular exposure and focus distance, and never changed the settings.
He supposedly (there is some disagreement about this) developed his photos in a portable “darkroom” in the trunk of his car. When the New York police began using radios, in the 1930s, Weegee somehow got a permit to have one of his own (he was the only freelance photographer who did).
His work was shown in museums like the Museum of Modern Art starting in 1943, and the first book of his photos — Naked City — was published in 1945. The book was used as the basis of the 1948 film noir movie The Naked City. Weegee himself appeared in another film, The Set-Up, the next year. He worked in the Hollywood film industry after that (part time) until the 1960s, and provided still photos for the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove. In that film, Peter Sellers played the title character, and said he modeled the accent he used on Weegee’s Hungarian accent.
Weegee wasn’t credited very often for his work in movies, and when he was it was sometimes under yet another pseudonym, “Luigi.” Weegee passed away in 1968, and his archive of over 20,000 images was donated to the International Center of Photography. They’ve since published several books and held multiple exhibitions of Weegee’s work. And if you liked the 2009 movie Watchmen, there’s a character who’s a photographer, and called “Weegee.”
You can also find him, or characters closely based on him, in numerous other movies and US television episodes. Weegee offered plenty of advice to aspiring street photographers, most of which boiled down to his most famous phrase: “you gotta be there.” He wasn’t exactly the first paparazzo, but he probably gave the paparazzi the basic idea.
