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Delightful shot of city children keeping cool during sumer heat is used as an end piece for the book. Everybody in the book is having fun in a frenzied, sprawling way. Beneath its comic surface, Weegee’s People is poignantly sad.”

Poignantly sad?!?! We disagree. Weegee’s People is full of incipient early post war optimism… poignantly comic…

(Hey, there’s an AF number on the upper left corner of this photo… it must have been made around 1943, or 1943-1945.)

Today, we call this photo: Summer, Upper West Side, 1943-44

In an intriguing and misleading (and perhaps incorrect) recent eBay auction one 8″ x 10″ photo, from the 1940s, and nine 4″ x 5″ photos, from the 1950s, were sold recently… All ten photos sold for $199.99.
One could argue that they represent Weegee’s work during World War II, enthusiastically covering the home front, (uniformly good and sometimes great), and his post war work, enthusiastically covering women in bikinis, enthusiastically covering cheesecake, (uniformly great and sometimes good;-)… One could also argue that nine of the ten photos were not made by Weegee…

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Photo was probably made in 1943-1944. (One stamp is from 1943-44, the other ca. 1966-68.)
Unusual: lighting, composition, content, etc.

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These photos were not made by Weegee. They were made around 1953. (Assistant? Nope.)

Images above and words below from eBay:

“”ARTHUR FELLIG “WEEGEE” 10 ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION”

“EXTREMELY RARE PHOTO SESSION BY WEEGEE AND WEEGEE STAMPS ON ONE”

THIS RARE COLLECTION CONSISTS OF (9) ORIGINAL SILVER GELATINS BY WEEGEE HIMSELF. THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPH OF WEEGEE AND MODEL WAS TAKEN BY HIS ASSISTANT. ALL OTHERS WERE TAKEN BY WEEGEE WITH HIS CAMERA PRESENT. “PHOTOGRAPH OF WEEGEE WITH CIGAR IN HIS MOUTH HOLDING HIS CAMERA.”

THE PHOTOGRAPHS WERE TAKEN IN 1940, NEW YORK, OF A PIN UP MODEL.

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS ARE 4″ X 5″, ALL SILVER GELATIN. “WILL PASS PSA” AS THEY ARE ALL THE ORIGINALS.

ALL ORIGINALS HAVE LIGHT WEAR.

2) ARTHUR FELLIG “WEEGEE” STAMPED SILVER GELATIN PHOTOGRAPH

SIZE: 10″ X 8″

VERSO: WEEGEE STAMPS AND WRITTEN NOTATIONS, 1948 NEW YORK

CONDITION: CREASE ON END LEFT CORNER, STAIN ON VERSO, PHOTOGRAPH NEEDS TO BE LAID FLAT, OLD PHOTOGRAPH.”

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“Most of 1954 I spent working on my equipment, developing my techniques. All these years I had been going along photographing faces and people. I liked people and was fascinated by them, but I believed that I had gone as far as I could with my old type of photography. My photo-cariactures would show not only how people looked, but what they were like inside. I would be giving the camera a new dimension. Photography had been invented to record scenes of nature, like a stencil. With my new lenses and new techniques, I had gone beyond that. I felt that I had made my camera human. Anything the mind could think of, I could put on film.”
Weegee, Weegee by Weegee, p. 127

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“I take pictures with my third eye – the inner eye – the eye that sees what lies beneath the surface of the subject. What some call a pictorial distortion may, in truth, be the reality. And what we call reality may be a distortion of the truth”
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