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1940

Balcony Seats at a Prize… Freelancer Fellig’s a Winner!

April 13, 2011
1940, Popular Photography
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Popular Photography, May 1940, pp. 44-45
Freelance cameraman Arthur Fellig’s a Prize Winner! (Perhaps not surprisingly, Fellig’s the only freelancer, and May 1940 is before he was widely known as Weegee…)
“Balcony Seats at a Murder” is included in the 5th Annual Exhibition of the Press Photographers’ Association of New York and Editor and Publisher News Photo Contest…
(You won’t see this one on too many bibliographies…)
Is that the Alan Fisher? A future colleague at PM? And the William Klein? And the Joseph Conrad?
A pre-PM free-lancing Fellig was understandably proud of winning the Editor and Publisher Prize… In February 1941, the beginning of his most productive year as a photographer, the award was still on his wall…


Weegee, [self-portrait], 1941

Learn Photography from the Experts…

April 8, 2011
1940, 1941, New York Institute of Photography, Photography Handbook, Universal Photo Almanac
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Photography Handbook 1955 and Universal Photo Almanac 1940 and 1941

It’s 1940 and you want to be a photographer… You could learn from the experts at the New York Institute of Photography, 10 West 33 St., NYC, (established in 1910!)… If you want to “Make good money for work that’s fun!” you could write to Universal Photographers, also, coincidentally, located at 10 West 33 St., NYC… If you don’t want to wait 60 years for the ubiquity of MFA programs you could “take the first step towards combining your photographic ability with that most enjoyable and profitable occupation – writing for publication!” Perhaps the Newspaper Institute of America can help get you started… “Hundreds of photographers have found that pictures sell faster, bring more money, when stories or articles are written around them! WHY DON’T YOU WRITE? It’s simpler than you think! You don’t have to be a genius!” Photo Almanac 1940 and 1941

"It seemed that the whole world had assembled on this beach, casting off its sinful, soiled clothes, and had established a naked city…"

January 18, 2011
1940, Coney Island
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Uncle Moses: a novel, By Sholem Asch, p.134, 1918


Weegee, PM, July 22, 1940

“The entire beach, as far as the eye could see, was inundated with wet, barefoot, half-naked people. Bodies, bodies, bodies everywhere… ‘And here we are now, all lying naked on Coney Island beach.'”

Large number of similarities between this passage from Sholem Asch’s “Uncle Moses” and Weegee’s text and photo…

According to the NY Times, from a review of a re-release of the 1932 film: “‘Uncle Moses,’ which is based on a 1918 novel by Sholem Asch (originally published in The Jewish Daily Forward in serial form), offers today’s audiences a glimpse of Maurice Schwartz…” (Maurice Schwartz! Another Weegee connection…)

The book can be read, downloaded, etc. here…

(first drafts)

October 22, 2010
1940, Coney Island
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There were a number of attempts by Weegee to make the famous Coney Island photo…
Here are some of them:


PM Daily 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, taken before July 22, 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 Daily 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 has a number of variations on their web site…

An early “version” of, or attempt at, this photo was published in PM Daily 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…