In ‘The Image-World’, one of the essays in Susan Sontag’s collection titled On Photography, the cultural theorist examines the status/standing of the photographic image compared to other ‘image-worlds’, with longer histories and tractability. The photographic image, Sontag notes, is unlike any of its ‘predecessors’: the photographic image comes across as reality’s [prime] usurper, since ‘a photograph in not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.’ Whether this image-making process is enhanced by the presence of the camera’s mechanical eye, which Sontag dubs (in one other essay in the publication), ‘a kind of a passport’ , a modern-day visa so to speak that allows the photographer to travel and record people, places, environments without the pang of social and moral inhibitions, or perhaps it is a simple matter of the personal choices a photographer makes when approaching a subject, the photographic image emanates the possibility of allowing ‘reality’s minutiae’ to come forth, unencumbered, in all their splendor.
What happens then to the photographic image-world, when the ‘documentary’ and the ‘sensational’ element co-inhabit the same terrain of photographic interest? How do we approach photographs that were set to record and at the same time supplicate the gross, grotesque, ‘rejected’ side of life’s multifarious nature, such as man-induced calamities, obscene behavior, deglamorized wealth? What do we ‘see’ in these image-worlds? What do they stand to ‘tell’ us about the world that they set out to ‘capture’ in the first place?
In today’s world of shady journalism and tabloid induced reality, photographic images are no longer ‘naïve’ records of a simply truthful situation. Digital technology has helped usher the insofar most privately kept into the public arenas, even going as far as engineering its truth-laden validity. Whom we see in digital photographs, or better what we get to pay witness to does not necessarily stand to represent a truthful account of a past moment/situation. Everything could be fabricated, cropped up and refashioned to suit the profits-driven media industry. And almost everything is.
Long before this came into power, newspaper photography, and its ‘fast track’ journalism tactics, sought out people and places it could frame so as to deliver the public its share of ‘news worthy’ stories. The newspaper photographers of the 1930s and the 1940s needed not to concoct images as their colleagues in the tabloid press nowadays do; the world they set out to record was far too sensationally new to be made up.
All throughout the 1930s and the 1940s, with the staggering number of daily publications on the rise, American photojournalism brought the greater public its share of unfolding urban ‘myths’: a curious mixture of fire and murder sites, opening nights at the cinema and opera houses, handcuffed prisoners and ‘subterranean entertainers’, all populating shady ‘joints’ and police cars, not to mentioned Fourth of July Parades and V-Day celebrations. Amongst the crowds of almost identical ‘flashing lights’ that of New York-based photographer Arthur Felling, known under the semi-pretentious sobriquet ‘Weegee’, stood slightly on the outside. Weegee photographed the same terrain which also triggered many of his media-savvy contemporaries’ flashes; however, what has set him apart from their respective work, and in turn, has allowed his photographs to stand the test of time, is the uncanny post-anthropological approach he took towards ‘imaging’ his subject matter.
Unlike his contemporaries, Weegee, an immigrant child of New York’s Lower East Side, was both a product and an originator of his photographed topography. This perhaps not so unique a trait, nonetheless, equipped the photographer with a particular understanding of the environments he trespassed on his way to get the ‘Page One’ photo. His ‘participant observer’ sensibilities, which enabled him equally to take part in ongoing activities while observing the surroundings with an open mind, render his work, particularly that exhibited in his first book-length collection titled Naked City (1945), passionately realistic, for it delivers a singularly phantasmagoric account of New York’s urban experiences.
Naked City contains 229 images spread out in 18 loosely connected chapters; the pictures were taken with a Speed Graphic 4x5 camera, adorned with a Graflex synchronized flash.
The book’s overall structure, with its fragmented arrangement, between individual chapters, on the one hand, and within the chapters themselves (that is, between Weegee’s introductory notes, the captions for the photographs and the photographs themselves), on the other, contributes to likening the image-world as presented in the book to one coming out of ‘film noir’ aesthetics. The late 1940s saw the proliferation of the genre, with some of its most prominent examples, such as Gilda, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Fallen Angel, The Killers, The Postman Always Rings Twice, skyrocketing at the box-office while Weegee pursued his photographic work in a similar vein. Both end-products, the film noir movies and Weegee’s photographs of New York’s urban lifestyle, display a mutual sense of shared visual aesthetics, ranging from the incorporation of strongly contrasted, almost pure black and white images, to the preferred use of artificial sources of lighting. Weegee critic and fellow filmmaker, Alain Bergala, calls this historic overlapping of aesthetic choices, ‘one of those historic, rare coincidences, rich with implications for the parallel history of the arts, by which two only apparently related expressions [at this time, cinema and photography]…for a time happen to be at the same outposts of the representation of a period and of a change of ways of thinking that seek further new forms and rhythms to manifest them.
Both William Klein and Diane Arbus, notable names of the post-1950s school of photography have cited Weegee and his work as a valuable influence.Even though none of Weegee’s photographs from Naked City made into it Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition, he was a forerunner for ‘rudely honest’ photojournalism, representing the city’s landscape and its inhabitants with a vigorous sense of ‘less ornamentation, more life-gripping viciousness’. Reverently, Weegee’s work exhibited in the collection Naked City does not expound on the idea of the ‘American Promised Land gone Wasteland’ that Klein’s and Arbus’s works, respectively, call into prominence. From the opening images in the collection, through the more volatile spaces of murder and fire sites, to one of the last photographs ever taken of the great Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee’s photo-storytelling only purports to ‘tell it like it us’, whatever that ‘is’ may be. His American landscape does not pay tribute, either way, to the melting-pot theory of immigrant life in the New Land; his is a New York of overpopulated boroughs which turns strangers into neighbors/intimates, seeking innovative ways to make ends meet while witnessing life and death passing by. It may appear that the photographer, who incessantly pursued the next murder or fire scene, brought Middle America, as well as his fellow New Yorkers, a warning against the treacherous nature of the American Dream myth. With a dazzling number of crime scene photographs in the Weegee archive, mostly housed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art archives, it seems that Weegee’s images, if not the photographer himself, dispel the mythical semblance of the American life: no one really makes it, all could be lost in a flick of a fire.
Even so, the empathy his photo-text-images put forward to contemporary readers of the Naked City, with a ‘curious self’ rather then a mere voyeur illuminating the people and places inside the frame, Weegee’s work renders the publically private its lost intimacy, familiarity, peacefulness and undaunted craziness amid the rumble of violence and surreptitious fragmented existence.
What more is there to ‘dream’ about, in colorful black and white?
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