Kentucky Suitcase 3: "Weegee is such a fascinating figure and character…"

from pdn online:

Indianapolis Museum Announces Major Weegee Acquisition

By Daryl Lang June 03, 2008

A trove of Weegee photos discovered in a trunk at a 2003 yard sale has been acquired by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the museum announced Tuesday.
The acquisition is a major boost for the museum’s fledgling photography collection and represents the biggest Weegee collection outside of his estate, which is housed at the I C P in New York.
[That’s not true]
The IMA acquisition includes 210 photos and over 100 documents, including letters, press clippings and artifacts such as Weegee’s social security card.
“Weegee is such a fascinating figure and character, and straddles the photojournalism and edgy modernism… worlds,” says Martin Krause, the IMA’s curator of prints, drawings and photographs. Krause says the museum hopes to show the work once a slot is available on its exhibition calendar, perhaps in 2010.
A serendipitous shopper unearthed the collection at a yard sale at a Kentucky farmhouse in 2003. The photos and documents were then acquired by Steve H. Nowlin, a dealer of rare documents in Indianapolis. Nowlin then pitched the collection to the museum. “He invited me to come take a look and see if I was interested, and I was,” Krause recalls.
But the museum declined to purchase the collection until now, under its new director and CEO – Maxwell L. Anderson – and with funding from the Caroline Marmon Fesler Fund and the Alliance of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
It’s unclear how the work ended up in a trunk at a yard sale, but it likely belonged to Weegee’s longtime partner Wilma Wilcox. Wilcox bequeathed the artist’s archive to the I C P in 1993.
Weegee’s real name was Arthur Fellig. He took his nickname (after the Ouija board) from his uncanny ability to be first on the scene of crimes and accidents while working as a news photographer in New York City. His street photography in New York and his later coverage of the Los Angeles celebrity scene were collected in the influential books Naked City and Naked Hollywood. He died in 1968.

There’s nothing as useful as a good press release…