Sunshine Recorder

If It Bleeds

Weegee’s photographs are as much about Weegee as they are about crime.

In the fall of 1978, the International Center of Photography mounted the first retrospective of Weegee photographs. Reviews of the show were positive, though the reviews often centered on debates about the artfulness of Weegee’s tabloid images. The New York Times critic began with the very conundrum of this tension between art and news photography: “It is always faintly alarming to see the photographs of Weegee on exhibition at a museum or gallery. They were not made for exhibition but to be reproduced in tabloid newspapers.” Despite this beginning, the review affirms Weegee’s importance in American photography, and argues that his work influenced later artists such as Diane Arbus and Garry Winograd.

Just a few months before this retrospective opened, John Berger published his essay “The Uses of Photography.” In the essay, he makes a crucial distinction between private and public photography: 

In the private use of photography, the context of the instant recorded is preserved so that the photograph lives in an ongoing continuity. (If you have a photograph of Peter on your wall, you are not likely to forget what Peter means to you.) The public photograph, by contrast, is torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use.

For Berger, public photographs—these dead objects—float in a stream of images such that the subject of any particular photographed moment or event turns into a generalized reality absent of context. Like much of his writing in this period, Berger’s concerns were directed to the political force and ethical values of photojournalism. This moment in the late 1970s also saw the publication of Susan Sontag’s collection of essays On Photography. In it, Sontag presents her focused critique that photographs have created a “chronic voyeuristic relationship” to the world around us. There was no better example of this critique than Weegee’s tabloid images of urban street life and crime scenes, all of which appeal to our voyeuristic tendencies. His revival emerged within these new, critical views of our image culture, and discussions of his work have often been enmeshed in these debates. Though his photographs haven’t changed since the 1970s, our relationship to them has.

…

Weegee’s appeal today rests in how his images reflect our contemporary notions of photographs as intangible objects of ephemeral moments. Our photographs are mostly public now, dead objects, as Berger would say, that offer a generalized account of life, found on Flickr pages, online profiles, tabloid websites. Weegee’s scenes of murder and mayhem engage us and haunt us because they fit well with our way of looking: a collage of the strange and surreal, photographs where context is often stripped away, leaving us with images that swirl in the stream of hundreds of other images, each a flash of joy or tragedy echoing other, similar images. A belief in a photograph’s uniqueness evokes a kind of sentimental nostalgia when the digital archive of our lives and the lives around us accumulates with rapid speed. Weegee’s images teach us this. I suspect they feel more contemporary to us then they did in the 1930s and ’40s. Like those haunting faces in the crime scene crowds, which beckon us with their stares, our continuing fascination with Weegee’s murders suggests all that has changed in the simple act of looking.