Black, white and blood red

摘要

Weegee's photographs of the seamy side of New York are luridly fascinating: car crashes, tenement fires and lifeless bodies sprawled across pavements. He always carried a Speed Graphic camera with a massive flash in his nocturnal prowls around the city, which made his night-time shots both intelligible and distinctive. The extreme contrasts in black and white were perfectly suited to the extreme situations he depicted, with people who were generally weeping, leering or dead. Born Usher Fellig in 1899 in a part of the world that is now Ukraine, Weegee moved with his family to New York's Lower East Side in 1909. His nickname came either from an early stint as a "squeegee boy" (ie, a darkroom assistant) or from his Ouija-like ability to get to a crime scene faster than the authorities-though this clairvoyance owed much to his police radio.