“Crime Stories: Photography and Foul Play” at the Metropolitan Museum
Weegee in the National Portrait Gallery…
Weegee Negative: FDR and FHG in TC
NYRB: RRCI
Filed under Exhibitions in our electronic filing cabinet:
Raunchy, Raucous Coney Island
By J. Hoberman…Its subject is the mental construct “Coney Island”—an illusion filtered through such earthy sensibilities as the tabloid photographer Weegee, the American scene painter Reginald Marsh, or the anonymous artisans who created the banners and signage for Coney’s attractions.
Coney Island peaked as a people’s playground during World War II and began its slow decline when the largest of the amusement areas, Luna Park, burned to the ground in the summer of 1944. Although Weegee’s stunning news photo of the ruins, showing two forlorn painted hearts above a lone fireman in a sea of wreckage, gets smaller play than it might, the image of absolute devastation haunts the exhibition’s final section…
Weegee and Morris Engel, his sometime colleague at the leftwing tabloid PM, are the show’s best-represented photographers…
… and the photos Weegee took of the World War II–era Coney Island crowd from a vantage point on the Steeplechase Pier…
Auction results… February 2016…

Screen shot from swanngalleries.com

Screen shot from swanngalleries.com
Weegee, The Critic, 1943
(Perhaps the size, 21 x 25 inches, of this photo is unusual.)
Sold for $12,500
For more info: swanngalleries.com
75 Years Ago Yesterday…
I haz no inhibitionz…
74 years ago today: “She told police she was expected to be married soon.”

New York Daily News, February 9, 1942
“Crying Babies Drive Nurse Crazy; She Dopes 2, 1 Dies
Her face pale with grief, nurse Irma Twiss Epstein, whose own baby died a year and a half ago, is booked at Morrisania Police Station in the death of a new-born baby whose crying was ‘driving me crazy'”
[“Aliens Begin Registering. Registration of enemy aliens begins today…”]
“Here is Nurse Accused of Killing Baby
Distraught and pale with grief, Irma Twiss Epstein, 32 year-old nurse, whose own baby died 18 months ago, is booked on a homicide charge in the death of a baby whose crying, she said, “drove me crazy.” Miss Epstein, Bronx Maternity Hospital nurse, is accused of giving a powerful drug to the 20 hour-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Castro Vallee, whose only other child died after birth 11 years ago. Another infant, 4 days old, was revived by nurses and doctors after Miss Epstein was found in a hallway hysterically sobbing: eyedropper, baby.” Hospital records showed she entered service there in 1940 and after nine months took a leave of absence to have a baby. Police said she had been in Bellevue’s psychopathic ward two years ago for observation after tasking an overdose of sleeping tablets. She told police at Morrisania Station she expected to be married soon. PM Photo by Weegee.”
PM, February 9, 1942, Vol. II, No. 168, p.3






















