‘Weegee: Society of the Spectacle’ Review: Calamity on Camera
A show at the International Center of Photography focuses on Usher Fellig, aka Weegee, featuring the pictures of crime scenes and car crashes that made him famous as well as less sensational human-interest shots and his later distorted portraits.
Weegee is home. Born in 1899 in Zolochiv, a town in the east of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Usher Fellig had his Jewish first name Anglicized to Arthur when he passed through Ellis Island in the summer of 1909. The family lived at various addresses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a densely populated, poor neighborhood. He left school when he was 14 years old and left home two years later, sleeping where he could; in 1935, after learning photography by working in darkrooms at the New York Times and Acme Newspictures, he rented...
