Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous

"We recognised Weegee’s photographs—they are unique and unmistakable—but knew little of the man behind the camera. We had only Weegee’s—or Fellig’s—account of his own life: Weegee by Weegee . Bonanos entwined Weegee’s evolution as a person and as a photographer and placed this story in the context of the emergence of street photography and crime photography. He vivified that that moment when technology—the camera in Weegee’s hands and imagination, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York—captured a rich, stark world in a revolutionary way. Weegee declared himself as “the world’s greatest living photographer” and Bonanos captures the self-mythologizing Weegee with his Speed Graphic, beating out his competition to depict accidents and disasters—as well as high-society—with his distinctive noir touch. Bonanos tracks Weegee into his sad declining years and makes a case for Weegee’s influence and his enduring images that functioned as little one-act plays of great human drama. Like many of us, Weegee was probably not the most faithful witness of his own life. Biographers can use autobiographies as a lens that reveals how someone wishes to be seen. They can be helpful in that way, but they are a slant on a life and are a literary art form that shouldn’t substitute for a rigorous, illuminating biography that takes the full measure of a life. Who doesn’t want to be hero of their own story? Bonanos brings extraordinary insight to Weegee and his times, and I’m not sure that Weegee himself would have had the perspective to make his life and work meaningful for readers. Autobiographies at midlife are meaningful and revealing in their own way, but they are not biographies that can endure the test of time. They are more a report from the front, a sanitised dispatch from the trenches of life. The recent past poses both advantages and disadvantages for a biographer. On the positive side, one can interview those who lived in that era, and sources—undigitised newspapers, for instance—can be easier to locate. That said, the distant past can be a bit more elusive, and this requires being more ingenious about locating resources and clues. Fortunately, for me, that treasure hunt is endlessly fascinating. What characters read, what they ate and how they dressed can be revealing, but my personal rule is to avoid conjecture on what characters think as that is a sticky wicket of unreliability, and no substitute for evidence."