Weegee Daily… Balcony Seats At A Murder… November 17, 1939

November 17, 2014
1939, murder, New York Post, Weegee Daily

ny_post_1939_11_17b-2
New York Post, November 17, 1939
“Street Scene in New York
After the guns ceased barking and the gunmen fled, neighbors peered from the fire escape and almost every window last night for a glimpse of the body of Anthony Greco, slain in front of his own cafe at 10 Prince Street.
Associated Press Photo”

IMG_9758-3
IMG_9758-2
Ceegee, November 17, 2014
Balcony Seats At A Brunch… Balcony Seat While Shopping in Noho…

——————————————————————————————————————————
ny_post_1939_11_17b-2
New York Post, November 17, 1939
“Street Scene in New York
After the guns ceased barking and the gunmen fled, neighbors peered from the fire escape and almost every window last night for a glimpse of the body of Anthony Greco, slain in front of his own cafe at 10 Prince Street.
Associated Press Photo”

life_1939_11_27e-2

life_1939_11_27f-2

life_1939_11_27h
LIFE, November 27, 1939
Murder in New York
“After dusk on Nov. 16, Angelo Greco stood smoking outside his cafe in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Emerging from the darkness, a man drew a gun, fired four shots, fled into the night. Greco tumbled dead in his doorway. From windows above, heads popped out. Police cars screamed into the street. Close in their wake arrived Arthur Fellig, famed free-lance photographer (LIFE, April 12, 1937) who sleeps behind police headquarters, has a short-wave radio in his car. He listened briefly while neighborhood folk stolidly disclaimed knowledge of the murderer, then stepped back and photographed this dramatic street scene.”

naked_city_p78-79a_-2
Weegee, Naked City, pp. 78-79, 1945
“Balcony Seats At A Murder
This happened in Little Italy. Detectives tried to question the people in the neighborhood… but they were all deaf… dumb… and blind… not having seen or heard anything.”
Weegee, Naked City, p. 79

——————————————————————————————————————————

“Street Scene in New York
After the guns ceased barking and the gunmen fled, neighbors peered from the fire escape and almost every window last night for a glimpse of the body of Anthony Greco, slain in front of his own cafe at 10 Prince Street.
Associated Press Photo”
New York Post, November 17, 1939

Murder in New York
 “After dusk on Nov. 16, Angelo Greco stood smoking outside his cafe in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Emerging from the darkness, a man drew a gun, fired four shots, fled into the night. Greco tumbled dead in his doorway. From windows above, heads popped out. Police cars screamed into the street. Close in their wake arrived Arthur Fellig, famed free-lance photographer (LIFE, April 12, 1937) who sleeps behind police headquarters, has a short-wave radio in his car. He listened briefly while neighborhood folk stolidly disclaimed knowledge of the murderer, then stepped back and photographed this dramatic street scene.”
LIFE, November 27, 1939

“Balcony Seats At A Murder
This happened in Little Italy. Detectives tried to question the people in the neighborhood… but they were all deaf… dumb… and blind… not having seen or heard anything.”
Weegee, Naked City, 1945, p. 79

“One of the best pictures I’ve made… I got up nine o’clock one night, and I says to myself, I’m going to take a nice little ride and work up an appetite. I arrive right in the heart of Little Italy, 10 Prince St…. This was a nice balmy hot summer’s night… Some of the kids are even reading the funny papers and the comics… To me this was drama, this was like a backdrop. I stepped all the way back around 100 feet, I used flash powder… Of course the title was “Balcony Seats at a Murder”… That picture won me a gold medal [see below]… I try to humanize the news story. Of course I ran into snags with the dopey editors…”
Famous Photographers Tell How… ca. 1955
(Weegee talking about how he made his amazing photo can be heard on the Weegee’s World website.)

“At 6:45 P.M., on November 16, 1939, A Lone Gunman Shot Angelo Greco in the doorway of his candy store at 10 Prince Street in Little Italy. Greco who had a long history of arrests, fell dead with four bullets to the head. The gunman dropped his weapon beside the victim and disappeared into the panicked sidewalk crowd… police dutifully recorded the interior of Greco’s poorly stocked store and the location of the body…”
Murder Is My Business, p. 72

——————————————————————————————————————————
berenson_balcony_IMG_9856-2
Weegee Dans Ls Collection Berinson, pp. 188-189

weegee_murder_IMG_9865-2
weegee_murder_IMG_9867-2
Murder Is My Business, pp. 72-75

——————————————————————————————————————————
A few years ago we made this related post, that pointed out the Editor and Publisher News Photo Contest prize award on the wall above his bed, in his home:
Balcony Seats at a Prize… Freelancer Fellig’s a Winner!


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

Several years ago we made this related post:
Balcony Seats at a Blog…

Weegee, Naked City, 1945
Balcony Seats at a Murder…
10 Prince St. New York, N.Y. ca. 1939


10 Prince St. New York, N.Y. March 3, 2008


10 Prince St. New York, N.Y. Septemeber 17, 2011

IMG_9758-2
10 Prince St. New York, N.Y. Septemeber 17, 2014

——————————————————————————————————————————

naked_city_p78-79a_-2
Weegee, Naked City, pp. 78-79, 1945
“Balcony Seats At A Murder
This happened in Little Italy. Detectives tried to question the people in the neighborhood… but they were all deaf… dumb… and blind… not having seen or heard anything.”
Weegee, Naked City, pp. 78-79

naked_city_p78-79a_1-2
Weegee (and Ceegee), Not the Naked City, pp. 78-79, 1945 – ca. 2010

naked_city_p78-79a_st_view-2
Weegee (and Google Maps), Not the Naked City, pp. 78-79, 1945 – ca. 2010

(to be continued…)

Naked Naked City

November 13, 2014
1945, Naked City, PM

pm_1945_07_18_18-19c_copy-2
PM, July 18, 1945, p. 19
LETTERS
From the Editor
Rave Notice
“There’s a new book in the stores today by Weegee, who bills himself as “the famous” – and is.
It’s a book of pictures – pictures such as you’ve never seen before, except maybe in PM. It is called Naked City, published by Essential Books, sells for $4 – and is worth it.
I’ve been through my copy now three times, and every trip there’s something new.
The book is a collection of the better pictures Weegee has taken in the years he has spent as a freelance photographer, mostly of murders and fires, but sometimes of love. Many of them have appeared as news pictures in PM, and you’ll remember some of them – certainly the ones of Joe McWilliams, the Nazi lover, with the rear end of his horse, and Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh with the late Lady Decies and their jewels at the opera.
It is unfair to use a single illustration as typical, but I’m using the one in the next column of the Bowery floozy’s gam because I like it, and because I like Weegee’s caption: Ladies keep heir money in their stockings…
Weegee is a rumpled, heavy-set, cigar-smoking man with a camera who lives with one ear at a police radio. He rather likes to pass himself off as a character. He is, but not exactly the same one.”
-John P. Lewis

That’s a great little review or notice. Now we know Naked City was published on July 18, 1945, sold for $4…
Inspired by the quote: “Many of them have appeared as news pictures in PM” and being curious, we decided to investigate the prepublication history of the photos in Naked City.
Naked City: 246 pages with 247 photos

Before publication in Naked City:
78 photos were published in PM
6 significant variant photos were published in PM
4 photos were published in The New York Daily News
3 photos were published in Life
2 photos were published in The New York Post
1 photo was published in The New York Herald Tribune

The earliest photo that we could conclusively date in a publication is “Balcony Seats at a Murder,” published in the New York Post, on Nov. 17, 1939.
The latest photo that we could conclusively date in a publication is “Opening Night at the Opera,” published in PM, on December 3, 1944.

(to be continued…)

A photo booth in his trunk…

November 11, 2014
Uncategorized

From The New Yorker’s Photo Booth, November 10, 2014:

In last week’s issue of the magazine, Tad Friend spoke to Dan Gilroy about his new film, “Nightcrawler,” in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man who sells footage of violent crimes to a Los Angeles TV station. Gilroy told Friend that he sees the character as a version of the photographer Weegee, who captured crime scenes and other jarring late-night incidents in New York in the nineteen-thirties and forties.

Weegee, whose real name was Arthur Fellig, lived across the street from a police headquarters, in Manhattan. He listened to his police scanner while lying in bed at night, and was known to arrive on the scene before the police did. After photographing incidents in what he referred to as “Rembrandt lighting” (“Even a drunk must be a masterpiece,” he once said of his approach), he would develop the film in a makeshift darkroom in the trunk of his car. His grim (and, at times, satirical) images—which were often the only photographic accounts of these after-hours occurrences—were widely published in New York papers, and continue to be exhibited today.

The New Yorker’s Photo Booth, November 10, 2014

Several of the titles and dates in the New Yorker’s Photo Booth post are inaccurate, perhaps their famous fact checkers do not check on-line material, here are two corrections:

weegee_nyer-01b
“Their First Murder,” October 9, 1941

weegee_nyer-05b
“Out of the river,” February 24, 1942 (Variant published in PM with the caption: “At 9 last night, the car, a shiny, black Buick, with Rhode Island license plates, was hoisted out of the [Harlem] river by a tug. Body of a Negro (feet are visible) was found in the car. Police Sgt. William Wilson eye witnessed accident.”)

All images are screen shots from The New Yorker’s Photo Booth, November 10, 2014

(We still haven’t seen any evidence proving the existence of a “makeshift darkroom in the trunk of his car.” It’s funny that if the theme of “The Original Nightcrawler” and the “Rembrandt Lighting” pieces is late-night incidents, that only two or three of the twelve photos were made, or possibly made, after 9 PM. A few were made during day (or late afternoon) light and a few were made indoors, at an unspecified time… Three or four of these images were published in PM, one was published in the (perhaps) The Daily News and about half were published in “Naked City”…)

Perhaps it’s just the idea of a Weegee, pre-war night-crawling in the noir of a black and white world, (with only a superficial knowledge of his life and work) that is appealing… Perhaps at this moment, Weegee is more of an archetype than a real person…

“The New Yorker did a profile on me. They sent down Joe Mitchell. When the New Yorker does a profile they really do a job. That guy, Joe Mitchell, did everything but come to live with me. (I think he was angling for that, too, but I had no room in my place behind police headquarters.) Mitchell not only had a pencil and a pad of paper, he had an X-ray machine stuck in the back of his head. We saw so much of each oher, that I got to know Mitchell as well as he got to know me. Maybe better.
PM asked me to do a profile on Joe Mitchell… which I did. I out-profiled the profiler. It was, as you might say, tit for tat.”
Weegee by Weegee, pp. 84-85

(Our opinion: Neither profile was ever published. As we understand it, they didn’t get along very well… Wonder if they ever crossed paths, much earlier in their careers, near police headquarters…)

The New Yorker’s Photo Booth

68 Years Ago Today… Weegee’s People

November 10, 2014
1946, PM, Weegee's People

pm_1946_11_10_pm10-11a-2

pm_1946_11_10_pm10-11c-2
PM, November 10, 1946
“These pictures are from Weegee’s People (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, $4), which will be published on November 11. Weegee says of his new book: ‘Unlike my previous book, Naked City, this is New York in a happier and gayer mood. I went looking for beauty and found it. Here’s my formula – dealing as I do with human beings, and I find them wonderful – I leave them alone and let them be themselves – holding hands with love-light in their eyes – sleeping – or merely walking down the street. The trick is to be where people are.’ Weegee’s next venture will be movie-making.”
(That’s a significant quote… We know when Weegee’s People was published and perhaps the first printed reference to Weegee’s film making and Weegee’s “formula” for making his photographs and the location of a well-known photo is printed…)
“Weegee’s People at Manhattan Avenue and 107th St.” (That’s here on a Google map.) Summer Upper West Side, ca. 1945