Weegee's World

He was a man of the streets, a tough guy with a cigar in his mouth, the very cliche of a 40s press photographer. And looking again at his He was a man confirm, one at the Pace/MacGill Gallery (October 29 through November 28), the other at the Janet Borden gallery (December 1 through January 16)—you sense immediately that he and his subjects not only understood but appreciated each other. Like the cop looking at a woman being taken away on a stretcher. You can almost hear him shouting, "Hey, Joe, here's Weegee. Let him through." Critics today praise Weegee for the starkness of his photos—the hard flash effect—but miss the point. Countless other photographers used a Speed Graphic with a four-by-five negative holder and one flashbulb. What set Weegee apart was how he coped with those constraints.

Every shot required reloading. He had no zoom, no telephoto lenses, so he had to go in close to get the action, the impact, the faces. Looking at the back of a construction worker in one of his photographs, you see all the tools, the gadgetry. Such detail! Such information! I wouldn't have liked to compete with that. Was Weegee a self-promoter? Yes, because he was a freelancer, jockeying with staff photographers from the more than a half-dozen New York dailies and the wire services. Did he set up some of the photographs? Possibly. The picture of children sleeping on a fire escape during a heat wave comes to mind. Were the children asleep? Does it matter? What I like most about Weegee is that he wasn't a peddler of gloom. These faces have hope. There is an energy to them, captured honestly, with heart. Let the posh people go inside, Weegee seemed to say; out here are the real New Yorkers.

HARRY BENSON