Weegee Returns – A photographic tribute to a legendary cult photographer!

Once upon a time in a wild and dangerous city, there lived a bold and fearless photographer. He roamed the inky black night of America’s most populated and crime-ridden city, aiming his weighty camera at smoking car crashes, injured people in motionless clumps, and murder victims face down in pools of shiny blood. There was no lurid scene too shocking for his blinding flashbulbs. Newspapers clamored for his gruesome pictures. His name was Weegee, and he satisfied the curiosity and endless thirst of Americans for the visually horrific. Among his fans were Alfred Hitchcock, the Prince of Fright.

While working as a photographer and copywriter for Photoflex, I was tasked with doing an April Fools Day photo for our print and web advertising. What could we do? What hoax could we perpetrate on the readers of the ad? The Art Director for the company, Ray Obeto, and I decided we would announce a totally fictional product presented by a famous long dead photographer: Weegee.

For the props, I had a Baby Graphic and a Speed Graphic, similar to the ones Weegee used, and a box of old and unused ‘special blue’ flashbulbs designed for daylight balanced color films.

Many modern photographers might not know who Weegee was, but they should. He was a freelance photographer in New York from the mid 1930s through 1950. He had no formal training, but became quite proficient as a hard-edged shooter, always on the scene before anyone else. He did this by sitting in the hallway of police stations listening to the radio traffic. He later got his own radio rigs, including one in his car. His ability to process his own photos in record time made him the favorite of tabloid newspapers featuring fast breaking stories. He is credited with the saying, “F/16 and be there.” He rarely changed his focus from 10’, his aperture from F/16, or his shutter from 1/250^th of a second. The bloody scenes he visited were often littered with used flashbulbs.

Despite his anonymity to most present-day folks, Weegee remains a cult figure to many. Ray and I felt he’d be a perfect personality for our hoax, if we could do some convincing look-alike photos. There are very few photos of Weegee, and they are all unflattering, to put it mildly. We made ours better!

In this next photo I could not get both Ray’s hand and face in focus, so I did them as separate shots and joined them in Photoshop. I’m a longtime user of film, and I could have done this as a paste-up, as I’d done in many advertising shots in the film days, but why agonize over that technique? I must admit: There’s no photo that cannot be improved by Photoshop.

We agreed that shooting the assignment on film was essential, so I used a Mamiya C33 with Kodak Plus-X. (I still have about 40 rolls left in my freezer.) The film was developed in D-76 1:1 and printed on expired Agfa paper. I also shot the principle color photos on defrosted Ektachrome 64. I copied the prints and transparencies with a Nikon D-300 and 85mm lens.

Ray was the model. I insisted he smoke for the shots, which he resisted, having quit only a year ago. Using a cigar was out of the question. The plan was not to have him inhale, but that proved to be a temptation he couldn’t resist! I used bare bulb strobes for the lighting, to imitate the effect of flash bulbs.

Was the hoax successful? Yes! Photoflex received over 1000 orders for 10-packs of flash bulbs with that bogus ad!! The fact that we didn’t have any bulbs to fulfill the orders didn’t seem to bother anyone. They enjoyed the joke and got a $20 certificate for future orders over $100. Big win all the way around!

Weegee died in 1969, but his spirit lives on in cult films with leading characters based on his life: Naked City 1948, The Setup 1949, The Public Eye 1992 where Joe Pesci plays Weegee, X-Files “Tithonus” 1999, Road to Perdition 2002, Nightcrawler 2014, and many more.

Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig lives on!

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