“It’s like discovering 73 unknown poems by Walt Whitman,” says the keeper of the Weegee archives
Weegee, he was called — that and nothing else.
It wasn’t his real name, of course, only a nickname bestowed upon him by people who couldn’t figure out how this man with the camera arrived at crime scenes before cops and coroners. Weegee — like a Ouija board. Except he was a newspaper photographer, the best to ever look through a lens.
That was almost a century ago, when the man born Usher Fellig made art of the awful by snapping photos of murders and mob hits, criminals and victims.
His work was meant only to sell newspapers whose editors shouted, If it bleeds, it leads! Decades later it decorates gallery walls and fills pages of thick coffee-table books.
Seldom does Weegee’s work come to auction. And never before have the 73 photos in Heritage’s April 4 Photography Auction been made available to the public. Because until a year ago, no one knew they existed.
Everything you need to know about these extraordinary — and extraordinarily rare — photos hitting the auction block this weekend can be found in a May 2019 New York magazine headlined, appropriately, “Lost Weegee Crime Photos Revealed! Hiding in a junk-store box, unseen for 82 years. Historians, journalists astounded!“
The magazine’s city editor Christoper Bonanos tells the seemingly tall tale behind the recent discovery of photos taken in the 1930s, bought for a few bucks in 1970 and then stashed away for decades. Bonanos was the right man for the job: Not long ago he collected a National Book Critics Circle award for his biography of Weegee titled Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous.
“When they hit my in-box, I about fell out of my chair,” Bonanos wrote. “To my eye, several of them rank with Weegee’s best work.”
Archivist Christopher George, the Weegee collection at the International Center of Photography, told Bonanos these photos constitute “an extraordinary find.” As in: “It’s like discovering 73 unknown poems by Walt Whitman or unearthing a novella by Melville.”
The 73 Weegee photos will be sold in 29 lots at Heritage’s Photography Auction on April 4.