Eye see, a portrait…

http://www.photoformulary.com/images/2008Newsletters%20folder/June2008NL.pdf

From the Photographer’s Form-ulary June 2008 newsletter, a tip of the hat to photographer Bill J ay, who took the above photo of Fellig, has a new book of portraits, and owns a dog named Weegee…

“Another portrait,
this one of Arthur
Fellig, the crime photographer of
the streets of New York City, was
taken under a bare bulb in Fellig’s
seedy hotel room. Bill didn’t know
it at the time, nor perhaps did Fel-
lig but Fellig was dying of a brain
tumor.
Earlier in his career Fellig slept
in his clothes, a police radio
nearby. When he heard a radio call
about a crime serious enough for
his attention, he raced to the scene,
often beating the cops. His seem-
ing uncanny ability to pop up out
of nowhere earned him the nick-
name of Ouija. Fellig couldn’t
spell, but liked it enough that he
changed his name to Weegee the
Famous, even
stamping it on
the back of his
prints.
Weegee’s room
was filled with
stuff of all kinds.
There was no
place to sit other
than on Wee-
gee’s single bed,
so Bill stood. The room was
packed with prints and photo-
graphic paraphernalia. Weegee
was in and out of consciousness as
Bill attempted to interview him.
Then, during one of Weegee’s
more lucid moments, (which looks
more than slightly deranged,) Bill
caught him on camera under the
glaring light of the single bare
bulb above the bed. The look in
Weegee’s eye says it all.
Of that moment, Bill says, “Wee-
gee was obviously tiring so I left
him, a sad sick old man, alone with
his life’s work. I knew I would
never see him, or his like, again.”

Where was “Fellig’s seedy hotel room?”
Wilma’s beautiful brownstone, neither seedy nor a hotel, at 451 West 47th St. perhaps…

Three months before his death…