Weegee S People

In 1946, a year after the runaway success of Naked City, Weegee published his affectionate but sharp appraisal of the citizens of New York.Weegee's People presents a true cross-section of New Yorkers, from the photographer's cherished street people to the rich dames who frequented the Metropolitan Opera. This facsimile is a painstaking recreation of the original book, and follows the success of other facsimiles printed by Steidl including Moï Ver's Paris (2003) and Jakob Tuggener's Fabrik (2003).

Arthur Fellig (1899-1968), better known as Weegee, was an Austrian immigrant who worked as a freelance news photographer in New York City. Beginning his career on the police beat where he specialized in crime and catastrophe, Weegee roamed the city during the 1930s and '40s in search of the Page One photo: the image that would stop you at the newsstand.He was among the first to fully realize the camera's unique power to capture split-second drama and exaggerated emotion. But his profound influence on other photographers, most famously on Diane Arbus, derives not only from his sensational subject matter and his use of the blinding, close-up flash, but also from his eagerness to photograph the city at all hours, at all levels: coffee shops at three in the morning, hot summer evenings in the tenements, debutante balls, parties in the street, lovers on park benches, the destitute and the lonely. No other photographer has better revealed the non-stop spectacle of life in New York City.Weegee's first book, Naked City (1945), was a runaway success and made him a celebrity who suddenly had assignments from Life and Vogue. By the publication of his second book, Weegee's People (1946, he had cut the wires to his police radio and had begun to photograph the furred and bejeweled grandes dames at the Metropolitan Opera as well as his beloved street people. Naked Hollywood (1953) and Weegee by Weegee (1961) feature portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khruschev, and Liberace—many of them viewed through the distorted lens of his Weegee-scope.Regarded as some of the most powerful images of 20th-century photography, Weegee's work now resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The first comprehensive biography of Weegee—photographer, “psychic,” ultimate New Yorker—from Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid. Arthur Fellig’s ability to arrive at a crime scene just as the cops did was so uncanny that he renamed himself “Weegee,” claiming that he functioned as a human Ouija board. Weegee documented better than any other photographer the crime, grit, and complex humanity of midcentury New York City. In Flash, we get a portrait not only of the man (both flawed and deeply talented, with generous appetites for publicity, women, and hot pastrami) but also of the fascinating time and place that he occupied. From self-taught immigrant kid to newshound to art-world darling to latter-day caricature—moving from the dangerous streets of New York City to the celebrity culture of Los Angeles and then to Europe for a quixotic late phase of experimental photography and filmmaking—Weegee lived a life just as worthy of documentation as the scenes he captured. With Flash, we have an unprecedented and ultimately moving view of the man now regarded as an innovator and a pioneer, an artist as well as a newsman, whose photographs are among most powerful images of urban existence ever made.

'Weegee' is published to coincide with an exhibition of the photographer's work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles from September 20, 2005 to January 22, 2006.

Offers a collection of photographs by the controversial photojournalist that chronicles the seamy underside of life in New York City, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Reprint.

When Naked City was published in 1945, it was an instant success and inspired a Hollywood film. Naked City is Weegee's unflinching look at his beloved New York City through photos by turns ironic, hilarious, seamy and brutal. Photographing the city at all hours and in all its guises, Weegee created a thrilling, lonely and candid portrait, and a style that was to inspire younger photographers, not least Diane Arbus. Steidl's facsimile of Naked City carefully recreates the original book, bringing to life an object that is in form and spirit as close as possible to the first edition, and of which Weegee would be proud.

“While Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Alfred Steiglitz photographed New York's sleek skyscrapers, Arthur Fellig (called Weegee) documented the seamy underside of depression-era New York. In this extraordinary book, Richard Meyer and Anthony Lee tell a gripping tale, filled with historical detail about Weegee's transformation from freelance newspaper photographer to fine artist with the publication of his enormously successful book Naked City, in 1945.”—Cécile Whiting, author of Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s “Lee and Meyer return Weegee to his 'working world' by exploring the multiple contexts of his production-the Photo League, the tabloids, the exhibition galleries, and the book market. The volume adds an important dimension to our understanding of how Weegee straddled the worlds of popular culture, photojournalism, and left politics."—Miles Orvell, author of American Photography and John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II (UC Press) “Groundbreaking. Anthony Lee and Richard Meyer delve deeply into a rich archive of media and exhibition history, criticism, and biography to arrive at original interpretations of the most enigmatic photographer in modern visual and print culture.”—Jordana Mendelson, author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Many recent works of contemporary art, performance, and film turn a spotlight on sleep, wresting it from the hidden, private spaces to which it is commonly relegated. At the Edges of Sleep considers sleep in film and moving image art as both a subject matter to explore onscreen and a state to induce in the audience. Far from negating action or meaning, sleep extends into new territories as it designates ways of existing in the world, in relation to people, places, and the past. Defined positively, sleep also expands our understanding of reception beyond the binary of concentration and distraction. These possibilities converge in the work of Thai filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who has explored the subject of sleep systematically throughout his career. In examining Apichatpong’s work, Jean Ma brings together an array of interlocutors—from Freud to Proust, George Méliès to Tsai Ming-liang, Weegee to Warhol—to rethink moving images through the lens of sleep. Ma exposes an affinity between cinema, spectatorship, and sleep that dates to the earliest years of filmmaking, and sheds light upon the shifting cultural valences of sleep in the present moment.