Rocco Finds His Pal Stabbed… pt. 2

PM, July 31, 1941, pp. 16-17

An on-going collection of images from publications of “Rocco Finds His Pal Stabbed” (Published July 31, 1941) and variants…

Surprisingly, this image isn’t in Naked City. It’s  slightly interesting to ask and examine how many variant images there are for each well-known image, or how many exposures, how many different negatives did Weegee make of each scene. Of course every “crime scene” or the setting of each photo is different; for the “Rocco Finds His Pal Stabbed” image (corpse and dog), there were at least two negatives made. And one of the negatives was sometimes cropped significantly when it was published. Even though the corpse is, of course, not going to move, Rocco was moving, Rocco was walking across the floor and frame, we guess that Weegee took the photo that was published in PM first, somewhat hastily, after he recognized the poignancy and novelty, and the possibility of a great caption, something like, “Dead man and his best friend…”  and then as the man was walking toward the corpse and dog, Weegee quickly changed film, replaced the exposed sheet of 4×5 negative film with an unexposed one, and then after the man walked over to the dead body and live dog, then Weegee took a slightly more thoughtful or composed image… How many images did Weegee make for each story,  how many images were made for context, to illustrate the story. Was Weegee consciously  creating photo essays? For the Rocco image, he took at least four total negatives, two of the corpse and dog, one of Rocco outside, at the door, and one of the bar, with the warm glasses of beer. And then he (presumably) looked across the street and saw the crowd of people in front of the synagogue, made an exposure, and then walked over and took another picture…