75 Years Ago Today… “Yesterday at Coney Island… Temperature 89… They Came Early, Stayed Late”

PM, July 22, 1940, pp. 16-17

We just stumbled on this classic post:

(first drafts)

There were a number of attempts by Weegee to make the famous Coney Island photo…
Here are some of them:

PM June 17, 1940, pp.16-17
(The first draft of the first draft of the first draft of history…)

Weegee’s photos of the crowd at Coney Island, presumably made on July 21, 1940 (perhaps in chronological order)…

The number of variants, or number of exposures, or photos that Weegee made of the same scene is something that interests us a great deal. The version of this photo that was published in PM on July 22, 1940, is not the same photo that appears in the all of the Weegee books, from Naked City to Weegee’s World… A prominent photo agency (Corbis) has a number of variations on their web site…

An early “version” of, or attempt at, this photo was published in PM on June 17, 1940, in a trial or test version of the paper, a day before PM started publishing, a day before Volume one, Number one…