A great article in a NY Times fashion magazine about Esther McCoy appeared a few weeks ago…
Surprisingly no mention of McCoy’s great film Weegee in Hollywood (1950, 7 min.).

“She reported on slum clearances and the crisis in low-cost housing and wrote book reviews and a trilogy of detective novels. When her friend Jean Evans, a writer for New York PM Magazine, [PM!?!?], married the future director Nicholas Ray in 1936, McCoy served as a witness. With Ray, McCoy collaborated on a screenplay about troubled youth that was never finished.” p. 60

Her archives are here (at the Smithsonian, Archives of American Art)
Surprisingly no mention of Weegee in Hollywood in the Archives of American Art webpages…

When we look at these “Weegee Original Photograph”s (not Original Weegee Photographs), that are available on ebay, we think, “there is no way these are Weegee photos…” but then, the optimist in us thinks, “well maybe they are, it’s not impossible…”

How can one prove that they are “real”? How can one prove that they are “not real”?

Almost all, more than 90%, of the “Credit Photo by WEEGEE the Famous” stamps that we’ve seen are in a purple-pink color, not black, and they never have that ink residue. (We have to confirm the dates, but we believe that that stamp was used primarily around 1943 – but we have to double check that.)

The above example of a “real” Weegee stamp, is from the George Eastman House’s Note on Photographs, and can be found here.

Of course we could be wrong, but we think they are not Weegee photographs…