Weegee's New York. Photographien 1935-1960. München/Paris/London: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996. Paperback, 388 pp. 29 x 23,2 cm. 335 duotone plates.
With an autobiographical text translated into German by Reinhard Kaiser, p 7-33.
Language: German.
A fine copy, clean and crisp.
Weegee's New York is the New York of the 30s and 40s, marked by traces of the Big Depression: unemployment, poverty, prostitution, violent crime, and gang wars. Weegee, real name Arthur Fellig (1899-1969) was the pictorial chronicler of this era.
Equipped with the experiences from his own miserable childhood in the Jewish immigrant district on New York's Lower East Side, with a police radio and other best connections to the Manhattan police headquarters, Fellig is ahead of the cops and the places where things happen at night.
Images of traffic accidents, fires, celebrities, or murder victims are created there, which in their directness and atmospheric quality are reminiscent of the Film Noir.
The 335 photographs in this book tell the story of New Uork during one of America's most violent and troubled epochs.