Weegee: Society of the Spectacle

There's a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer's career seems to be split in two. On one side, his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood; bodies trapped in battered vehicles; kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons; dilapidated slums consumed by fire; and other harrowing evidence of the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. On the other, the festive photographs--glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings, and premieres--not to mention a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life.

How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. Weegee: Society of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two sides of Weegee by showing that, despite formal differences, the photographer's approach is critically coherent.

In the first part of his career, which coincided with the rise of the tabloid press, Weegee was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked another sort of entranced crowd: the Hollywood spectacular with its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.